SUBMERGED PREHISTORIC SITE DISCOVERED WITH REMAINS OF EXTINCT SPECIES

BY
MARKUS MILLIGAN
MARCH 3, 2023

The discovery was made in the Quintero Bay on the central Chilean coast, where the researchers have been excavating a site designated GNL Quintero 1 (GNLQ1).

During the last Ice Age (approximately 24,000 to 17,000-years-ago), the marine space that Quintero Bay occupies was a large esplanade of wetlands which stretched several miles from the current coastline. The esplanade was home to various extinct fauna such as paleolamas, mylodones, American horses and deer, as well as species of rodents, foxes and coypus.

With the thawing of the ice sheets, a rise in sea levels caused the esplanade to become submerged, providing the only known end-of-Pleistocene submerged site on the Pacific coast of South America.

A study of GNLQ1 by archaeologists and palaeontologists have uncovered deposits of camelidae, cervidae, equidae, mylodontidae, xenarthra, canidae, myocastorinae, and octodontidae, in addition to numerous remains of mylodon, all of which are similar to types of animals found at sites of Paleoindian hunter-gatherers in similar environments in central Chile.

The underwater field work consisted of an excavation by strata, vacuuming the sediments that were cleared to later recover the faunal assemblages in blocks, together with the sediment that contained skeletal remains.

More:
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2023/03/submerged-prehistoric-site-discovered-with-remains-of-extinct-species/146360