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Hundreds of images of the now nonextant mammoths and mastodons — elephant - like animals hunt down by prehistorical people — have been found in Europe , but none had turn up in the Americas , until now .
A fragment of bone , discover in Vero Beach , Fla. , by a fossil huntsman , bears a 3 - in - long , 1.75 - in magniloquent ( 7.62 centimetre by 4.45 centimeters ) engrave of a trunked animate being , whose shortened , high - vaulted skull and longer forelimbs evoke thebody of a mammoth , consort to researchers , led by Barbara Purdy of the University of Florida .
This faint engraving, found by a fossil hunter in Florida, is the first known ancient depiction of a mammoth in the Americas.
If genuine , this rare and spectacular find allow evidence that ancient multitude dwell in the Americas during the conclusion of the Pleistocene Epoch created esthetic images of the animals they hunted , Purdy and her colleagues write online in the Journal of Archaeological Science .
mammoth and their mastodon relatives go away approximately 13,000 old age ago , at the last of the Pleistocene Epoch , so this simulacrum must have been carved by that metre , fit in to the research worker .
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The bone itself appears to have belonged to a large mammalian , most potential a mastodont or mammoth , or less potential , a elephantine sloth , they write . [ ikon of sculpture ]
The effigy on the bone is not pronto evident , and the fossil hunter who name it , James Kennedy , did not notice it for two or three years after collecting the off-white . When a cleanup revealed the engraving , Kennedy contact researchers .
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The researchers congeal out to aver that the carving was indeed make by ancient people using a change of analytic and imaging techniques .
" All of these results are coherent with the gigantic etching being authentic , " they conclude .
Originally published on Live Science .
