Fossil footprints suggest ancient humans hunted giant sloths
Standing at up to 2.5 metres tall, with thick, muscular legs and sharp wolverine-like claws, the giant ground sloth was not an animal to be trifled with. But it seems that didn’t stop ancient humans from hunting them. Researchers at Bournemouth University and the University of Arizona have found a series of footprints indicating that our ancestors once stalked the ferocious animals.
The team found the tracks, which date back around 12,000 years, on a remote salt flat in New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument.
“This wasn’t just one human footprint and one sloth footprint. Somebody was walking along, purposely putting their feet in the sloth tracks,” said the University of Arizona’s Prof Vance Holliday. “It’s pretty amazing to see that sort of fleeting evidence of behaviour. You don’t see that kind of thing very often in the really early archaeological record.”
Early humans in North America were known to hunt mammoths and mastodons but these tracks are the first evidence that they may have hunted giant sloths, the team says.
“We also see human tracks on tip toes approach these circles; was this someone approaching with stealth to deliver a killer blow while the sloth was distracted? We believe so,” said the University of Bournemouth’s Prof Matthew Bennett. “It was also a family affair, as we see lots of evidence of children’s tracks and assembled crowds along the edge of the flat playa. Piecing the puzzle together, we can see how sloths were kept on the playa by a horde of people and distracted by a hunter stalking from behind, while another crept forward to strike the killing blow as the animal turned.”