Ice Age Giant buffalo, mammoths and First Peoples
A North Dakota Heritage Center display of buffalo skulls found within the state. Photo taken by John Joyce.
Written by John P Joyce
Ask any three or four-year old to look at an artist illustration of a woolly mammoth or saber-tooth cat, and they would point and say, “Manny!” “Diego!” Buffalo have lived here on the Northern Plains for thousands of years, so I’m curious why the huge Ice Age buffalo, Bison latifrons, sporting horns over seven feet tip to tip has not been casted in any of the six Ice Age movies I’ve watched with my grandkids. After all, Disney created a bit part for “Junior the Buffalo” for a 2004 animated feature.
In the first Ice Age movie, tragedy struck Manny and his Mammoth family. One day a group of humans on a hunt happened upon them and gave chase. While Manny tried to fend them off, his wife and baby son fled but were soon cornered and killed by more humans wielding spears. Manny’s best effort couldn’t save them. If I was the head script writer, on behalf of all the grandparents in the world who don’t want to experience their grandkids crying out of grief, I would have written Bison latifrons into the script to save Manny’s family. After all, the Ice Age big male and female animals on the Northern Plains of the Dakotas were mammoths and Bison latifrons. I would have scripted in the giant buffalo’s jazzed up species name, B-lat, knowing it wasn’t as cool as T-rex. The grandkids preferred to stick with “Manny” and “Junior the Buffalo.”
The great thing about the Ice Age movie series, though certainly not always accurate, is that the Ice Age didn’t happen in just Canada or Alaska. It happened right here in North and South Dakota!
The last two glacier periods in North Dakota occurred between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago, and both times glaciers buried the northeastern three-fourths of the state under several hundred feet of ice. The southwestern one fourth of North Dakota, though spared from the ice sheets, became part of a world-wide, frozen belt of tundra known as the Mammoth Steppe—not an easy place to settle. Rather than one long stretch of frozen hell, the Ice Age had periods when the ice melted back. [1]
In between these interglacial periods, Ice Age animals such as mammoths, horses, monstrous bison, giant ground sloths, camels, and their predators such as short-faced bears and saber-tooth cats migrated back into the state. Every now and then some of their fossil bones or teeth are found such as the 47,500 year-old Bison latifrons skull together with its fossilized set of horn cores found on a Lake Sakakawea shore in 1998
Bison latifrons became extinct about 20,000 years ago, but another Ice Age species of bison, Bison antiquus, survived to become the direct ancestor to today’s buffalo. Scientists are still researching and debating why so many of the large late Ice Age animals became extinct around 10,000-12,000 years ago. [2] Just last May, a seven foot mammoth tusk buried for thousands of years was discovered by workers at the Freedom Mine near Beulah. Knowing this was something extraordinary they reported it, and during the next several days a team of North Dakota paleontologists carefully excavated the site and found more than twenty mammoth bones.
The archaeologic and genetic evidence for peopling in the Americas is still unfolding. What many scientists know is that about 30,000 years ago the first traces of people in Siberia were evident and sometime later made an entry into the Americas. [3]
The oldest human footprints in North America based on archaeological evidence are 23,000 years old, located at White Sands National Park in New Mexico on the former shore of ancient Lake Oteo, now a desert of gypsum sand. [4] [5] These First Peoples would have hunted mammoths, bison, sloths, and camels and were themselves probably hunted by predators
In 2018, researchers at White Sands discovered what they believe to be footprints of a female that show her walking almost a mile, with a toddler’s footprints occasionally down beside hers. She shifted the child from hip to hip as she walked at a fast pace likely because of the urgency of her mission or because of potentially dangerous, large Ice Age animals and their predators such as dire wolves, lions, and saber-tooths.
She clearly had a predetermined location in mind. The footprints broadened and slipped in the mud as a result of the additional weight she was carrying. She returned alongside the earlier trackway after apparently dropping off the toddler. Between the outbound and return legs of the trip, she missed by a few hours or less a giant ground sloth and three mammoths crosscutting her trackways. As the sloth crossed the female’s trackway it stopped, raised up on its hind feet and spun around searching for her. [6]
The first archaeological evidence of human migrations through North Dakota is from a people named Clovis 13,500 years ago before the last glaciers completely departed from North Dakota. They were extremely skilled, daring and innovative. They hunted a variety of animals—mammoths, mastodons, buffalo, and perhaps camels and horses. [7]
References available upon request from Info@BuffaloGrande.com
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Ancient Bison in North Dakota include Bison latifrons, a giant buffalo with long and only-slightly curved horns now extinct, at left, and decreasing-size species that once lived in the western US. Only the smallest of them all—the Bison bison, at right, survives today. They exist in two subspecies: Bison bison bison of the plains and Bison bison athabascae of the far north. Vore Buffalo Jump Foundation, 369 Old US 14, Sundance WY 82729; Tel: (307) 266-9530, email: <info@vorebuffalojump.org>
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