GIANT SLOTHS

by Skylaire Alfvegren

In the jungles of Patagonia, it’s speculated that giant ground sloths are responsible for odd footprints others believe belong to an even more fantastical creature, an unknown, human-like biped. In the summer of 1883, ancient human footprints were found in sandstone being quarried in the yard of the Nevada state prison in Carson City. After much debate, the scientific community found a scapegoat for the anomaly: a large Ice Age sloth, either Mylodon or Morotherium, was responsible for “the ancient human tracks” that defied explanation. O. C. Marsh, writing in the American Journal of Science, decided the sloth waddled so that “the hind feet covered the impressions of those in front,” explaining away what appeared to be the existence of sandal prints.

But the poor sloth just doesn’t get any respect. Did giant ground sloths live alongside native Americans as recently as 3,000 years ago? Conventional science posits extinction for the beasts 7,000 years previous.

In 1930, archaeologist Mark (M. R.) Harrington began working in Gypsum Cave, in a limestone spur of the Frenchman Mountain Range east of Las Vegas. Eight feet down, Harrington’s party found evidence of Basketmakers (a people living in the area over 2,000 years ago), as well as huge deposits of dung. Soon they found a skull and bones from the extinct ground sloth, Northrotheriops shastensis. Farther below these finds, they found atlatl (a spear-like predecessor to the bow and arrow) points and evidence of cooking fires.

Did these people live alongside the ice age sloth? The elephant-sized Megatherium lived 1.9 million to 8,000 years ago; the genus Megalonyx lived in North America from about five million years ago until the close of the last major glaciation, around 10,000 years ago. Harrington found sloth bones he believed had been split for their marrow because they bore the marks of a stone knife. His conclusion: the Basketmakers and sloths co-existed around 8,500 B. C. Recent radiometric tests claim the slothful calling cards date to 9,700 B.C., while the human artifacts are at most 2900 years old. But Harrington and other archaeologists and paleontologists of the time firmly believed the ancient mammals coexisted with modern day humans.

In his 1933 Southwest Museum papers on Gypsum Cave, Harrington backs up his own finds with a number of human/Ice Age sloth connections made elsewhere in the country. One Dr. Dickson found, in 1846, bones of two different sloths, Mylodon and Megalonyx, “side by side” with a human pelvis; Harrington writes that in Tennessee in 1896, H. C. Mercer was “practically convinced” that man “had coexisted with the great sloth” Megalonyx due to Mercer’s discoveries in that region. Between 1902-05, paleontologists working in California’s Shasta County found “bones split by man…associated with remains of a variety of extinct Pleistocene mammals” including sloths.

Harrington, most famous for his Lost City excavations near Overton, was no wide-eyed rube. He “scoffed” at the idea that the remains of two miniature horses, 30 and 15 inches tall, found in Arizona were prehistoric holdovers, rather than degenerate descendants of modern horses, possibly dating from the Coronado party of 1540.

He believed man and sloth coexisted, writing, “Recapitulating our sloth evidence, we may find man certainly associated with [genus] Nothrotherium, apparently with Megalonyx and possibly with Mylodon—three different types—in five and perhaps six parts of North America, namely Nevada...”

A spearhead of “human workmanship” found near the bones of an extinct Proboscidean (elephant or mastodon) in Walker River Canyon left no doubt in the minds of many late 19^th century scientists that they were buried at approximately the same time, before the last great rise of Lake Lahontan. Prospectors and some Indians murmured of “giant, slow-moving, red-haired animals seen in the mountain passages within the memory of living men” when Harrington excavated caves made accessible by the rising waters of Lake Mead. One wonders, If these ice age creatures survived that far along--what else might have?