Mammoth skeletons dug up at Mexico City airport construction site
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[May 29, 2020]
By David Alire Garcia
ZUMPANGO, Mexico (Reuters) - Alongside
construction crews racing to build the Mexican capital's new airport,
skulls and curving tusks of massive mammoths peek through the dirt as
archaeologists dig up more and more bones belonging to the ice age's
most famous mammal.
The latest discoveries include two huge skulls, along with scattered
ribs and limbs, found just inside the perimeter of where a new civilian
airport is being built, about 30 miles (50km) north of downtown Mexico
City.
To date, some 70 individual mammoths have been unearthed since late last
year. Dating back more than 10,000 years, this part of Mexico once
teemed with mammoth herds, drawn to the lush grasslands and lakes that
dotted the landscape.
The hulking bones left behind spawned legends of giants that dazzled
both indigenous civilizations and Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes.
Standing next to one partial skeleton, lead archeologist Ruben
Manzanilla, explains that this spot likely would have been part of a
meandering shoreline thick with mud on the edge of a lake formed at the
end of the last ice age.
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"When an animal this size fell here, it got stuck and couldn't escape,"
he said, as a convoy of construction trucks rumbled down a dusty road.
Manzanilla's Columbian mammoth, which unlike its cousin the wooly
mammoth had little fur, certainly lived up to its imposing name.
He estimates it weighed roughly 20 tonnes, or double that of a
Tyrannosaurus Rex, and reached a height of more than 4 meters (13 ft),
about twice as tall as pro-basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal.
Manzanilla believes countless mammoths likely succumbed to the muck, but
he also points to evidence from nearby sites that early human hunters
also used flint spears to bring them down and set rudimentary traps in
the water.
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A mammoth bone is pictured under a red tent at a site where
archaeologists of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and
History (INAH) work to unearth the remains, which include the bones
of more than 10,000-year-old mammoths from the construction site of
Mexico's new international airport, in Zumpango, near Mexico City
May 26, 2020. REUTERS/Henry Romero
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The urban footprint of metropolitan Mexico City, home to 22 million
people, has since replaced nearly all of the inter-connected lakes
that filled the area through Aztec times.
Two Tlaxcalan kings in 1519 showed Cortes what was likely a mammoth
femur and told him they descended from terrible but very tall men,
according to an account by the conqueror's contemporary,
soldier-turned-chronicler Bernal Diaz del Castillo.
"We were sure there had been giants in this land," wrote Diaz del
Castillo.
The incident is summarized in an article on the history of mammoths
in Mexico in the current issue of Arqueologia Mexicana by Leonardo
Lopez Lujan.
Even as more mammoth remains turn up, the digs have not slowed
progress on the new airport, a top priority for President Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Since the construction site lies within an existing air force base,
the military is also picking up the tab for team of 30
archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and
History (INAH), along with nearly 200 laborers, working on the
project.
(Reporting by David Alire Garcia; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and
Diane Craft)
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