Fossil bones and ancient stone points clearly show that both giant mammoths and hunting peoples roamed the high Southwest some 13,000 years ago. But did these two types of mammals meet? Rock art researcher Ekkehart Malotki thinks that a petroglyph panel on the San Juan River holds a tantalizing clue.
It’s challenging to date rock art. Some images of now-extinct mammals found on cliffs in the Southwest are clearly fake. But Malotki turned up a tiny detail with huge significance at the Upper Sand Island petroglyph site near Bluff in southeastern Utah.
Two mammoth depictions there show several highly distinctive anatomical traits – including paired tusks and domed heads. But most revealing is how the unknown paleo-artists drew the tips of the mammoth trunks. They’re shown with an inverted V-shape representing two prehensile “fingers.”
Elephants, the modern relatives of mammoths, use so-called fingers at the end of their trunks to grasp food. Today’s Asian elephants only have one finger-like projection. But Pleistocene mammoths, like modern African elephants, probably had two-fingered trunks.
Malotki thinks that only hunters who had closely observed mammoths themselves would have taken the time to peck in an otherwise obscure anatomical detail.
He says oral histories passed down long after the mammoths went extinct probably would not have included that detail—and that modern hoaxers also would not know about it.
So this tiny clue is the strongest indication yet that paleo-artists and mammoths were well acquainted back when the Southwest was a very different place.
