The Vero Beach Mammoth Engraving — Vero Beach, Florida

The Vero Beach mammoth engraving is a small piece of fossil bone from Vero Beach with the outline of a mammoth or mastodon scratched into its surface. In June 2011 researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Florida announced, as reported by Smithsonian Insider, that the Vero fragment is approximately 13,000 years old and that its engraving is the oldest and only known example of Ice Age art in the Americas to depict a proboscidean, the order of animals with trunks.

The study behind that announcement appeared online in the Journal of Archaeological Science on June 2, 2011. ScienceDaily gives its full title as Earliest Art in the Americas: Incised Image of a Proboscidean on a Mineralized Extinct Animal Bone from Vero Beach, Florida. Its twelve listed authors, led by Barbara A. Purdy, included Richard C. Hulbert Jr., Bruce J. MacFadden and Smithsonian anthropologist Dennis J. Stanford, so the Vero bone was examined by specialists from both institutions at once.

The bone turned up in private hands rather than in a trench. According to the Smithsonian, an avocational fossil hunter collected it in Vero Beach and only noticed the engraving later, while cleaning the bone. Recognizing what it might be, the collector contacted scientists at the University of Florida and at the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute and National Museum of Natural History. The Indian River Guardian dates the find to 2009 and calls it the first artifact of its kind and age ever found in the Western Hemisphere.

Accounts of the find spot vary in detail. The Smithsonian says the bone was originally found near the Old Vero Site, where human bones lay beside extinct Ice Age animals in an excavation from 1913 to 1916. Vero Beach 32963 reported in March 2014 that, by the collector's account, the bone came from about four miles from the Vero Man excavation beside the Main Relief Canal. The collector is not a public figure and is not named here; the national coverage credits an amateur Vero Beach fossil hunter.

The figure on the Vero bone is small. The Smithsonian measures the engraving at 3 inches long from the top of the head to the tip of the tail, and 1.75 inches tall from the top of the head to the bottom of the right foreleg. The animal carries a trunk, which is why the researchers describe it only as a proboscidean: the drawing could represent a mammoth or a mastodon, both of which lived in Florida during the late Ice Age.

The bone itself is a fragment from a long bone of a large mammal, most likely either a mammoth or mastodon, or less likely a giant sloth, according to the Smithsonian. A precise identification was not possible because the Vero piece is broken and lacks diagnostic features. Stanford framed what made it unusual: there are hundreds of depictions of proboscideans on cave walls and carved into bones in Europe, but none had been known from America before the Vero Beach bone. Stanford, of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, called the Vero find an incredibly exciting discovery in the 2011 release. For the study team that comparison with Europe was the point: an engraved proboscidean from Vero Beach filled a gap in the known record of Ice Age art in the Americas.

Authenticity was the central question. Purdy, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Florida and lead author, said there was considerable skepticism about the incising until the Vero bone was examined exhaustively by archaeologists, paleontologists, forensic anthropologists, materials science engineers and artists. A main goal was to learn whether the image was ancient or had been cut recently to imitate prehistoric art.

The team compared the elemental composition of the engraved bone with other fossil bones from the Old Vero Site. Optical and electron microscopy showed no discontinuity in coloration between the carved grooves and the surrounding material, which indicated to the researchers that both surfaces had aged together. The edges of the Vero carving were worn, and the grooves showed no signs of fresh cutting or of metal tools, according to the Smithsonian's account of the study.

The age estimate rests on the subject of the drawing. The Smithsonian explains that the engraving is at least 13,000 years old because that is the date for the last appearance of mammoths and mastodons in eastern North America, and later Pre-Columbian people would not have seen one to draw. Vero News reported in February 2017 that Purdy dated the inscribed Vero bone to between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago.

For the researchers, the Vero Beach piece showed that people living in the Americas during the last Ice Age made artistic images of the animals they hunted. The Smithsonian also said the study further supported geologist Elias Howard Sellards, whose early twentieth century claims of Ice Age hunters at Vero Beach had been disputed for 95 years. National media picked up the story: WBUR and NPR reported on July 25, 2011, that the bone found in Vero Beach had been identified as one of the oldest pieces of prehistoric art in the Western Hemisphere.

The Vero study also set the engraved bone beside the Old Vero fossil record. The Smithsonian notes that human bones were found side by side with extinct Ice Age animals at the Old Vero Site in an excavation from 1913 to 1916, and the team analyzed the engraved bone's chemistry together with bones from that site. The comparison tied the engraving's study to the same Vero Beach fossil record that had produced the Vero Man controversy nearly a century earlier.

The original Vero bone was studied in Gainesville and Washington, and the Smithsonian reported in 2011 that a cast of the carved fossil is part of an exhibit of Florida mammoths and mastodons at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Locally, the find had a large effect: the Indian River Guardian reported that residents organized the Old Vero Ice Age Sites Committee in late 2009 in response, which led to the 2014 to 2017 digs at the Vero Man site.

Archaeologists working in Vero Beach kept some distance from the engraving as evidence. Vero News reported in November 2015 that the precise details of the find had not been documented by archaeologists, and that in their view, absent context, it means nothing for dating human presence at a specific Vero location. Vero Beach 32963 had reported a year earlier that testing had so far not disproven the engraving's authenticity. The bone therefore stands as a laboratory-tested object whose exact findspot in Indian River County is known only from the collector's account.