High in the Mackenzie Mountains…
… scientists are finding a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools being revealed as warming temperatures melt patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years.
[…]
The results have been extraordinary. Andrews and his team have found 2400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1000-year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years. Biologists involved in the project are examining dung for plant remains, insect parts, pollen and caribou parasites. Others are studying DNA evidence to track the lineage and migration patterns of caribou. Andrews also works closely with the Shutaot’ine or Mountain Dene, drawing on their guiding experience and traditional knowledge.
“The implements are truly amazing. There are wooden arrows and dart shafts so fine you can’t believe someone sat down with a stone and made them.”
The question that continues to puzzle researchers is why these ancient hunters would expend so much effort drilling deep into ice to place them there.
The question that continues to puzzle researchers is why these ancient hunters would expend so much effort drilling deep into ice to place them there.
Well, you see, it was because the campfires of those paleolithic hunters sparked global warming…I mean climate change…so like, the glaciers got kind of like, warm. and like flowed down and like buried their stuff. Yeah, that’s it.
So, do I send this off driectly to the IPCC or does someone have to peer review it first?
AGW believers will read that and exclaim
“See how bad it’s geting? It’s unprecedented!”
“The question that continues to puzzle researchers is why these ancient hunters would expend so much effort drilling deep into ice to place them there.”
Beautiful. Now I have to clean my monitor…..
// The question that continues to puzzle researchers is why these ancient hunters would expend so much effort drilling deep into ice to place them there. //
Not to mention the caribou —
“In 1997, sheep hunters discovered a 4,300-year-old dart shaft in caribou dung that had become exposed as the ice receded.
Scientists who investigated the site found layers of caribou dung buried between annual deposits of ice. ”
The short answer is that ice is dynamic.
Of course the drilled through the ice and left their tools. No way the ice came later.
/snark off/
AlGW huffs, Moi can help wiff da warming. See, it’s not weather.
…-
“Cold from Seattle to Sao Paulo
“From the “weather is not climate” department.
By Steven Goddard
I noticed something interesting in the NCEP forecast for the coming week. Temperatures are predicted to be below normal across a 7,000 mile swath of the Americas. That is more than one fourth of the way around the earth. Below is a composite image of generated from three of the NCEP maps.”
“this seemed noteworthy for the dual hemispheric scope, even it is just “weather”.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
“The question that continues to puzzle researchers is why these ancient hunters would expend so much effort drilling deep into ice to place them there.”
Priceless.
“The question that continues to puzzle researchers is why these ancient hunters would expend so much effort drilling deep into ice to place them there.”
My theory… They hid the evidence to protect from the inevitable protests from PETA.
“The question that continues to puzzle researchers is why these ancient hunters would expend so much effort drilling deep into ice to place them there.”
You are sooooooooo baaaaaaaaaad!
Jamie MacMaster said: So, do I send this off driectly to the IPCC or does someone have to peer review it first?
—
No, you write a quick brochure and slip it under the door of one of their interns. It’s worked for everyone else.
Any change in the Artic is caused by man. Ice is eternal, or as our aboriginal friends would say: “Since time immemorial”. Of course all that really means is they can’t remember that far back, lack of a written language and all. Still, they are sneaky buggers burying their artifacts in ice, and going so far as to bury caribou poo with them to really screw with future scientists.
‘”We realize that the ice patches are continuing to melt and we have an ethical obligation to collect these artifacts as they are exposed,” says Andrews.’
Groovy, man! So, like, you’ll spend your own money, then?
Silly me. Of course not. You will continue to extort funds from the taxpayer.
Still, garbage collection is an essential service.
Yet for Politically Correct reason’s no one wants to acknowledge the fact that the Vikings lived in our High Arctic predating the present day Inuit. The artifacts some of them are in the Museaum of civilization in Ottawa.
Incredible. Truly incredible. I am gobsmacked.
I’m just going to patiently wait for the educated class to explain this to me. I’m betting that Al “It’s several million degrees in Earth’s core” Gore and his crack team of scientists are figuring this out right now. I’m sure it involves complex computer models and numerous carbon based epicycles.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/the_epicycles_of_global_warmin.html
When traditional astronomy began to collapse in the years before Copernicus, True Believers reacted by adding lots of little cycles on top of the great cycles of the planetary orbits, to protect their faith. Trouble is, they had to add so many cycles on top of cycles that eventually, the whole system became a laughingstock. Ultimately you could explain anything you wanted — after the fact.
The Polish astronomer Nicholas Koepernick — called Copernicus — pointed out that a sun-centered planetary model could get rid of all those epicycles with elegant simplicity. You only had to assume that the planets are going around the sun, not the earth. Suddenly all those cycle-on-cycle orbits simplified into near-circular ellipses.
“Newest cause of global warming – Clean air.”
re Hot Air
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126226938&ft=1&f=1007
I guess it was polar bears roaming far inland due to melting sea ice that drove those hunters up so high. Now I just need to find a way to feel guilty about it and we’re set for a grant.
I heard this on cbc radio (only because the wife won’t have anything else on in her car).
The caribou seek out the ice packs in spring/summer to avoid flies at lower elevations.
There is a lot of “dung” being exposed too, as it has built up over the “millenia” (a favourite term bantied about).
The “melting” is a good thing for the archeologists, though that never came up as a “benefit”.
slip it under the door of one of their interns. It’s worked for everyone else.
Posted by: Paul at April 28, 2010 5:47 PM
Well, Slick Willy tried slippin’ something under an intern… Tryin’ to get me impeached or something?
there is an easy answer for this. early man bought his stuff out of a freezer like the rest of us. He didnt go about killing stuff like Sarah Palin .
On another continent, but on the same western side, another mystery. At 4,000m or 13,000mi there’s this salt ‘lake’ on the top of the Andes, how’d that get there?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/8647423.stm
Fresh water falls on it yearly for months at a time and yet it remains a dry salt bed for the rest of the year.
No doubt ICPP will have some tall tale all lined up by next Monday replete with charts, graphs, and computer models claiming this is our new fate of doom.
slip it under the door of one of their interns. It’s worked for everyone else.
Posted by: Paul at April 28, 2010 5:47 PM
Well, Slick Willy tried slippin’ something under an intern… Tryin’ to get me impeached or something?
====
Hey hey!
Slick Willy was innocent.
The FBI analyzed the blue dress and searched through the pockets and all they found was a wad of bills.
Baddum Boom!
Oh Cuhh-mmon! “Scientists who investigated the site found layers of caribou dung buried between annual deposits of ice”.
First off, a caribou patty (turd), being a dark-coloured, fibrous conglomeration would be a magnet for the summer sun and would literally disolve into either nothing, or into the ice layers below. -Remember, we’re not in an ice age in this time frame, so there is some semblance of a summer.
Or,…the pile would be a virtual smorgasbord for eagles, ravens, terns, ptarmigans, lemmings, arctic foxes, eskimos ;), anthropologists, so these things would never remain intact going into the next winter at any rate.
What I suspect has happened is these ‘scientists’ stumbled upon a camp of last year’s ‘scientists’ and found their garbage dump. Further analysis will no doubt find high concentrations of Johnnie Walker and Starbucks markers!
Heads up… if you guys happen to find my wallet let me know. I think I lost it when taking a crap on that glacier in ’87. Or was it ’06? No matter. But I wouldn’t want it to fall into unscrupulous hands.
Well, as I’ve said before, anybody who says there isn’t climate change just doesn’t get it. Where I live has been under ice on and off at least a half a dozen times in the past few million years. So, the. Climate. Changes. Here. On. Earth. Duh.
As always, the big question (according to those who care about this) should be how much humans contribute to these natural cyclic phenomena.
I haven’t seen a good answer to this yet.
The thing I always wonder is why these ‘scientists’ can’t believe that the implements were made by stones… yet still decide they were! What if, perhaps, they weren’t made with stones, but with knives and planes and other instruments that have been around for thousands of years? We’re not tremendously smarter than people in the past…
Joshua: “What if, perhaps, they weren’t made with stones, but with knives and planes and other instruments that have been around for thousands of years?”
You’re joking, right? Did you learn this in school?
“The question that continues to puzzle researchers is why these ancient hunters would expend so much effort drilling deep into ice to place them there.”
My answer is that those ancient hunters ‘knew’ that someday goldminers would unearth Mammoths frozen in the perma frost, these people would need tools to cut up and eat their ‘frozen dinner’.
These ancient people were inventing ‘TV Dinners’, who knew?
850 years old? Well, why does that number ring a bell?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12098-freak-winter-is-europes-warmest-for-700-years.html
Maah, Michael Mann assures us that it is warmer today than it was then… Even though they were eating strawberries at Christmas in Central Europe without the benefit of jet aircraft.
Since poop has become a theme here [and a noble one it is] let me fire up my coprolitic converter long enough to point out that some of you don’t know shit about it —
A first lesson. Note the abcence of “caribou patties” [that was a cow you were tracking]
Also, the academic fascination with shit is long-standing, even in this particular case —
Researchers from the U.S., U.K. and Canada have been collaborating since 1998, when ancient caribou bones and feces were found in high mountain ice patches. In the summer, caribou migrate from the valleys to high mountain areas where the snow doesn’t melt, seeking refuge from insects. Thousands of years of accumulated caribou droppings have effectively turned some ice patches black, says Tyler Kuhn, a graduate researcher at Simon Fraser University and an author of the study published this month in Molecular Ecology.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/newsbriefs/read/195