[Aztlan] Oldest work of art in North America found?

[Allan Shumaker]

While this an amazing discovery, it is not a unique find. In the early 1920s Jay L.B. Taylor found a deer bone engraved with a stylized sketch of a mammoth in Jacob's Cave in Missouri. Taylor later published a paper "Did the Indian Know the Mammoth". This engraving has recently been mentioned by Suzanne Carr and Paul Bahn as representing a wooley rhino (which never existed in the Americas). 

Then there is the famous engraved mammoth pelvis found at Valsequillo in the 1950s by Juan Armenta Camacho. That engraving was a virtual bestiary of late Pleistocene fauna which included mammoths with 4 tusks (probably gomphotheres which were known to have survived in South America until Paleoamerican times). That engraved bone was featured in Time Magazine before the Classic Valsequillo excavations back in the 1960s.

Allan Shumaker