science and technical writing
Paleo-Indian Site Discovered Black Swamp in Felton, Delaware is surrounded by land that has been occupied and farmed since colonial times but a portion of it has remained undisturbed since the Stone Age. By Rob Crimmins Fossil remains of early man, his ancestors and
primitive cousins are very rare, so rare that many are known by the surnames given them by their discoverers. Donald Johanson found the oldest hominid (erect walking primate) fossil yet discovered in 1974. Some sixty pieces of a single individual were found on the surface of a dry riverbed in Ethiopia. Johanson named her Lucy because on the night of her discovery Johanson and his fellow paleoanthropologists had a party and the song that was playing when the question of a name arose was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. Lucy, the first example of the species that became known as Australopithecus afarensis, lived 3.5 million years ago. Java Man, the first known Homo erectus, was one skull and a piece of leg bone. He lived half a million years ago. The Tuang Baby, the first Australopithecus africanus was named after the region in South Africa where it was pulled out of a limestone quarry and Neanderthal Man (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis), who lived between fifty thousand and two-hundred thousand years ago, was named after the Neander Valley in Germany where he was first found. Stone tools have been discovered on a five-acre plot of land that rises out of the Black Swamp in Felton. According to Dan Griffith, Delaware’s State
Archivist, Paleo-Indian people might have left them there over 12,000 years ago. The Ice Age inhabitants of our fair town were Homo Sapiens Sapiens like us but they lived among species that pre-date ours. They may have hunted giant ground sloths and some might have been eaten by saber-toothed tigers. The condition of the site is rare and it’s possible that Felton could become extremely well known in some anthropological circles. Lucy was found where she died millions of years ago. Very few other hominid remains have been discovered on the ground where they first fell and fewer still were carefully recovered. Usually, they were scattered about by the predators that killed them or dispersed by flowing water or geology. In the case of many of the discoveries in European caves in the nineteenth century the people who recovered the remains did so carelessly and in the process destroyed the sites. So although the bones of Neanderthals were found, their tools, trash and other evidence of their lifestyles were lost. Most of the sites in North America where people lived as long ago as the last Ice Age have been plowed, built on or otherwise lost but a “living surface” has been found in Felton. The tools in the knob in Black Swamp were a few feet below the ground but when they were dropped hundreds of generations ago that ground was on the surface. The lay-
er that they occupy now has not been disturbed in all that time. Because the soil is damp and acidic no human remains will have survived but traces of their lives might remain. An unusual organization based in New Mexico, the Archeological Conservancy, is negotiating with the owners of the site to purchase the land so that it can be preserved and studied by archeologists. If they do buy the land, which seems likely, there may be some very interesting discoveries. Maybe someday we’ll see Samuel Felton’s name latinized in a textbook, the result of a crazed and inebriated gang of paleontologists and a historic celebration at the Owl’s Nest.