The Americas’ oldest known artist may have been an Ice Age hunter in what is now Florida, according to an anthropologist who has examined a 13,000-year-old bone etching.
The carved bone, which depicts a walking mammoth, was found near Vero Beach in east-central Florida.
The now exclusive area once hosted giant beasts and nomadic bands of Ice Age hunters, said Barbara Purdy, a professor emerita at the University of Florida.
The examinations revealed that the light etching is not recent, and that it was made a short time after the animal died, according to Purdy.
Scientists also determined the 38 centimeter long (15-inch) bone fragment probably belonged to one of three animals: a mammoth, a mastodon, or a giant sloth, all of which died out between about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
Source: National Geographic.
