By Carolyn Cole/Staff Writer

Bits and pieces of history revealed itself beneath thousands of years of dirt last month when state scientists and researchers discovered what they believe are prehistoric bones in Canadian County.

Teams, including members of the Oklahoma Anthropological Society, Oklahoma State University soil scientist Bryan Carter and Oklahoma Museum of Natural History paleontologist Nick Czaplewski, unearthed an approximately 20,500-year-old mammoth on land near El Reno.

The property, where noted University of Oklahoma paleontologist J. Willis Stovall excavated a number of animal remains in 1949, is about 15 miles outside of El Reno, land owned by Gary Lemke and a co-owner.

In August 1949, Stovall and a team of students dug on the property and discovered bones of a mammoth, a mastodon, a horse and a camel, Wyckoff said.

He said Stovall’s team also speculated they had the remains of a ground sloth, but further research showed it to be a large land turtle, in the vein of the Galapagos turtles.

The bones were boxed and put away, but Stovall died five years later — without publishing any report. That mean there was no map of the area or a drawing of the geology where the bones came from.
“We had nothing from his work,” Wyckoff said.

He said all researchers had to go on was a newspaper account in the El Reno American of Stovall’s initial dig.

Eventually, Czaplewski found the Stovall bones, lying in wait in plaster of Paris, in a large crate marked in blue paint: ER49.
Sometime in the late '90s — 1996 or 1997 — a long-time associate of Wyckoff’s in the anthropological society told him about the site and the artifacts reportedly found there.

Wyckoff’s interest was piqued and, being a self-described “heretic” in the archeology profession, the museum curator decided to revisit the site.

His heresy he said was a result of publishing a report that stated 35,000-year-old human deposits were found at dig sites in Woods County.

“It got reviewed in some scientific journals and they basically said I was chewing funny weeds,” he said. But, being over 60 years old and having a gratifying career in archeology, Wyckoff said he could shrug off the criticism.

“If I were younger, though, I’d be fighting mad,” he said. “I figure, you know, how are you going to determine when people got here if you don’t dig in old deposits?”

That was the genesis of Wyckoff’s decision to dig around the old Stovall site.

The upshot was the archeologist and Czaplewski were given money by a benefactor to do preliminary work and, about two years ago, the team worked with Carter on coring samples, which were taken back to Stillwater.

After carefully cutting open the 4-foot-long tubes containing deposits and documenting soil layers and what was contained in the deposits, Wyckoff was “we pretty much knew extent of … what is a full glacier pond deposit.”

That means a glacial pond existed on the El Reno land about 20,500 years ago, which is confirmed by radio carbon dating.

He said the team was reasonably sure the deposit they were working with was the same area Stovall discovered bones in 1949.

Based on their previous research, Wyckoff said they “firmly established” deposits ranging from 30,000 years to 4,000 years ago.
“In essence, what is now a hillside contains a complicated record of how landscape has changed since 20,000 years ago,” he said.

Using El Reno’s Davis Construction Company, the team went out to the site and used a back hoe to excavate the land.

“What we are after were clues to small animals and other animals that were there at full glacial times,” Wyckoff said. “And, we might get lucky and find evidence of people.”

Team members discovered the Ice Age-era mammoth about seven feet above the layer of 20,000 year-old pond deposits, but no evidence of it being killed by humans.

The last ice age began about 75,000 years ago and ended around 10,800 years ago, said Don Wyckoff, archeologist and curator of the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History. That’s when ice began accumulating in the Hudson Bay area, Scandinavia and northern Russia, he said. From there it spread southward, not reaching its maximum thickness until about 19,000 years ago.

“The deposits we are looking at near El Reno are nearly full glacial times,” he said.

About 19,000 years ago, ice sheets covered all of New England, northern Ohio, northeast Illinois, northern Indiana, and much of Wisconsin and the Dakotas, Wyckoff said, adding the closest it came to Oklahoma was Ohio. He said researchers don’t have a clear picture of what was happening in Central Oklahoma during glacial times, but finding the bones of a large land turtle indicates it wasn’t frozen, since the animals can’t survive freezes.

“And one of the things that makes the location near El Reno so important … we have not seen deposits in Central Oklahoma — ever,” he said. “So, it’s exciting, even if we didn’t recover volumes or diversity of animal remains. We learn a lot and put together an interesting story.”

The land where the bones were recovered is now being resodded by Henry Heinrich and Wyckoff said he hopes it will be returned to its normal state soon after the teams’ 6-week stay.

Mustang Creek was also once the location of significant climatic changes in Central Oklahoma.

Wyckoff said the drainage basin that Mustang Creek occupies contains records of climatic changes over the past 10,000 years.

Archeologists know that between 10,000 and 4,000 years ago, the area was hot and dry, but somewhere between 4,900 and 5,500 years ago, there was a period of wetness, which produced grasses and possibly grazing bison.

Mustang Creek yielded a good soil sample, Wyckoff said, “and it’s one of the few places we’ve seen soil of that age.”

Mustang Creek soils date back at least 12,000 years, with recorded deposits from 12,000 years, 8,000 years and 5,000 years in the past.