The closest that Travis Rupp came to getting fired, he says, was the time he tried to make chicha. The recipe for the Peruvian corn-based beer, cobbled together from bits of pre-Incan archaeological evidence, called for chewed corn partially fermented in spit. So, Rupp’s first task had been to convince his colleagues to gather round a bucket and offer up their chompers for the cause.
Archaeologists studying a prehistoric site in Golden, Colorado, have found that people lived there thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
The site is called “Magic Mountain” after an amusement park that used to own the land back when excavations started in the 1950s.
Archaeologists like Mark Mitchell knew that people, likely nomadic hunter-gatherers, had lived and camped at the site for much of the last 5,000 years.
University of Wyoming anthropologists are putting out a call out for help looking for a lost mammoth. How do you lose a six-ton extinct animal that lived 13,000 years ago? Well, you find a few of its bones but lose track over the decades of exactly where they were found. But now some clues have come to the surface. Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards sat down with the University of Wyoming anthropology professor Todd Surovell, the detective trying to put all the clues together.
A summer hike up to a 13,000-foot alpine meadow can be exhilarating. But what if you decided to stay up there for the rest of your life? The lack of oxygen, frigid temperatures, and sparse vegetation would make it tough. Archaeologists know hunter-gatherers traversed highland areas thousands of years ago, but presumed they also had to spend time in lowland areas in order to survive.
That idea is now being challenged by a team of researchers at the University of Wyoming who have made a rare discovery.
