Environment

Toddler bones show mammoths were the main food of the first Americans

The bones of a child who died nearly 13,000 years ago suggest that the people who moved from Asia into North America at this time ate a lot of mammoth

An artist’s reconstruction of the toddler with his mother consuming mammoth meat Eric Carlson/Ben Potter (UAF)/Jim Chatters (McMaster University) An analysis of the bones of a boy who died in what is now Montana 12,800 years ago shows that nearly half of his diet came from mammoth meat. “To have it turn out to be 40 per cent, it’s just like, wow!” says James Chatters at McMaster University in Canada. In fact, when compared with other animals alive at this time, the boy’s diet was more similar to that of the carnivorous scimitar-toothed cat than that of.

...