Megafauna in Vermont: large mammals and early humans in pre-historical New England
What is megafauna? From Greek, megafauna simply means “large animal life,” and is a term used to classify the very large cats, bears, and elephants of the pre-historical eras. We’re thrilled to have Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel join us again for an in-depth exploration of how the animals, climate, and humans may have once existed in the land now known a New England.
Over 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, a host of fantastic beasts, including wooly mammoths and mastodons, roamed what is now called North America. Just as these animals began to disappear from the landscape the first widespread evidence of the human settlement of the Americas appears.
In what is now New England, no widely accepted human/megafauna associations are documented and only a handful of megafaunal specimens reasonably overlap in time with the first human groups to settle the region. However, a recent radiocarbon date obtained on the Mt. Holly mammoth found near Ludlow in 1848, provides the first evidence indicating that elephants and humans may have shared the landscapes of New England and presents the possibility that the first humans in the region may have hunted the last mammoths.
In this webinar Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel, an anthropologically trained archaeologist whose focus is in the study of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene populations of the Americas, will discuss how the understanding of human/elephant interactions in the Americas has developed through time, the current state of this research, and the importance of the Mount Holly mammoth right here in Vermont.
The Presenter
Join us for an evening with archaeologist, Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel. Nathaniel is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College. Nathaniel is an anthropologically trained archaeologist whose focus is in the study of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene populations of the Americas with particular interest in New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. His ongoing research explores the manufacture and transport of stone tools to understand how humans come to settle previously uninhabited landscapes and cope with past climate change. He uses these same methods to investigate the development and maintenance of social networks across large geographic areas with low population densities. You can find out more about Nathaniel and his research here.