Word: mastodon
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...overheard the author being introduced at a Hollywood screening.) On behalf of the Long Beach public library, he also tutored illiterates, who in turn guided him to some of the area"s more exotic landmarks. On his own, Theroux discovered the La Brea tar pits, the world"s largest mastodon graveyard, which conatins what he calls a "cynical metaphor" for Los Angeles: the skeleton of a woman who died about 9,000 years ago."Her skull was bashed in by a blunt object: this first Angeleno, the wall label tells you, was also LA's first known homicide victim...
Humans may have arrived in North America almost a millennium earlier than previously believed. A hacked up mastodon tusk, 12,200 years old, showed evidence that humans had cut on its tusk -- in what is now Florida. That geographic location also plays havoc with the notion that humans first arrived in the western part of the continent; instead, they may have begun their spread from Florida and other places east...
...decade of digging, Dillehay's team found an unparalleled array of artifacts, including not only stone tools and animal bones but also chunks of mastodon meat, wild potatoes, and seaweed and other plants that must have been imported from the Pacific coast, some 40 miles away. The archaeologists discovered fire pits surrounded by burned wood chips, wooden lances with hardened tips, wooden basins containing seeds, grindstones -- and a human footprint. The foundation of a wishbone-shaped structure held the remains of more than 20 types of medicinal plants, some of which bore marks that may be the imprints of human...
...ancient water hole called Taima-Taima in northern Venezuela became the deathbed of a young mastodon -- killed, apparently, by some of the first Americans. The site, excavated by Alan Bryan and Ruth Gruhn of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, appeared to contain 13,000-year-old mastodon bones, one of them embedded with a pointed stone projectile. Mixed in were stone tools and rounded pebbles that could have been made only by humans. Some archaeologists, however, believe the artifacts found at Taima-Taima became interspersed with the mastodon bones as the water level in the hole rose...
...awry, Thomas Geoghegan wanted to get away from it all. Joining the French Foreign Legion was out, but a roommate talked him into volunteering as an observer at a dissident Mine Workers election. That was in 1972, and the beginning of Geoghegan's love affair with a "dumb, stupid, mastodon of a thing," a creature that shambles around "with half its brain gone." The object of his passion: organized labor...