Stone tools of scraggly men dressed in furs could have cut into the gargantuan bones of a mastodon during its skinning and butchering over 13,000 years ago, after they'd felled it in what is now southern Iowa.
To uncover evidence of early ways of life in North America would be a scientific first, but recently tantalizing clues have been found half embedded in a creek. Bones are already being dug up.
Therein lies another first: Never before had a well-preserved mastodon skull been discovered in Iowa—until now.
Mastodons were tusked relatives of today’s elephants. They’re less closely related to elephants than are woolly mammoths. Though often confused with mammoths, they’re an entirely distinct species. While woolly mammoths were larger and grew thick fur coats, mastodons had no fur and grew prominent, forward-thrusted tusks, begetting the animal’s name.
John Doershuk, director of the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA), called the recent find a “treasure trove of biological data about the animal.”
“We’re really hoping to find evidence of human interaction with this creature—perhaps the projectile points and knives that were used to kill the animal and do initial butchering,” Doershuk said in a press release. “There’s also potential evidence on the bones themselves—there could be identifiable cut marks.”
Evidence now points in this direction, as archeologists have unearthed several man-made artifacts surrounding the site, including stone tools dated thousands of years old. Yet the mastodon bones are older still. All this points to what was previously unknown: Humans and mastodons may have been present in the creek drainage region at the same time.
In 2022, a Wayne County local made a call to the OSA telling of someone who had stumbled on an unusually long bone in a winding creek bed on private property. At first they weren’t sure what kind of bone it was.
After a team of archeologists arrived, it became clear that it was a mastodon femur. That led to a more startling revelation: They found a broken tusk protruding from the creek bed, positioned so that it suggested a skull was still attached and buried underground.
All the intrigue prompted a formal scientific dig. Funds secured, OSA scientists returned in August 2024 to excavate the mastodon’s skull and other bones. Radiocarbon dating deemed them to be 13,600 years old.
The big deal about its age is that it overlaps with known early humans in the region. Current knowledge says that the first humans in North America crossed the land bridge from Asia and Siberia to Alaska 13,000 to 13,500 years ago. It’s possible they hunted mastodons for meat and leather.
While mastodons stood with a shoulder height of 9 to 10 feet tall and were larger than most modern elephants, woolly mammoths were larger still, standing from 9 to 11 feet tall. Only male mammoths had tusks, but both male and female mastodons bore their distinctive ivories.
The mastodon species lived for tens of millions of years and only went extinct about 10,500 years ago. They disappeared far earlier than woolly mammoths, which vanished about 4,000 years ago.
To find a mastodon skull so old and well preserved is remarkable. Looking closer at the bones, their orientation, and location could reveal how they were deposited in the creek bed and how early humans and mastodons interacted.
Once extracted, the bones will undergo conservation and study before finding a permanent home in a newly designed exhibit at the Prairie Trails Museum in Corydon, Iowa.
