manasataramgini
manasataramgini

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5 Tweets Dec 19, 2022
IMO solid work presenting evidence for paintings depicting American megafauna like giant sloths, American elephants & horses, & notoungulates before they wiped them out: royalsocietypublishing.org
This immediately brought to mind the great Argentinian Florentino Ameghino for whom I've considerable admiration (some flawed ideas notwithstanding). An autodidact biologist, in his life of 56 years he wrote 24 vols worth of papers on anatomy &evolution amounting to ~18000 pages
In 1899 CE Ameghino correctly identified this mysterious bit of skin as coming from a giant sloth & proposed they must have coexisted with humans& might still be around. While the latter doesn't see true, the former was the case. Remarkably, this skin is ~13200 years old &
& survived under peculiar circumstances in a South American cave. In the same cave bone tools made by humans were also found but it was unclear if they were from the same age as the skin. But conclusive evidence came with the discovery of sloth scapulae which were cut by Homo.
The Colombian Amazon paintings establish that Homo sapiens in the Americas overlapped with megafauna when they entered the continent. It is likely that the innovation of the Clovis (-like) points eventually led a hunting culture that wiped these out after the 1st humans arrived

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