Eureka! Quarry near oilsands full of ancient artifacts (Edmonton, Canada)
Oilsands activity has uncovered vast wealth of a different kind -- a 10,000-year-old quarry rich with tools and weapons from some of the first Albertans, including a pristine spearpoint still smeared with the blood of a woolly mammoth.
"It's got this echo of the Ice Age world," said Jack Ives, Alberta's provincial archeologist, who described the find in a hearing before the province's energy regulator yesterday.
"There's quite a rich concentration of artifacts."
The so-called Quarry of the Ancestors, which scientists suspect may be one of the first places where humans put down roots in northern Alberta after the retreat of the glaciers, is found on an outcrop of hard, fine-grained sandstone adjacent to the Albian Sands oilsands lease about 75 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.
Read entire article at Hamilton Spectator
"It's got this echo of the Ice Age world," said Jack Ives, Alberta's provincial archeologist, who described the find in a hearing before the province's energy regulator yesterday.
"There's quite a rich concentration of artifacts."
The so-called Quarry of the Ancestors, which scientists suspect may be one of the first places where humans put down roots in northern Alberta after the retreat of the glaciers, is found on an outcrop of hard, fine-grained sandstone adjacent to the Albian Sands oilsands lease about 75 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.