Giant Bears Terrorized Ancient America

by Dr. E.J. Neiburger


Man has occupied the Americas for the last 50,000 or 60,000 years. His earliest habitation sites cluster in South America. But why didn't early humans settle in North America before colonizing distant areas farther south? Perhaps the answer may become self-evident in the following conjectured scenario from the distant past.


Boki finally completed the long walk over the cold and windy land- and ice-bridge later known as the Bering Strait. He and his paleo-Asian band moved south along the great water to a land beyond the glaciers. The land had dense pine forests and much game. A shadow also traveled with them. It was cast by a giant bear.


Boki and his band called the roaring creature "Gor." He was a terrible spirit, not like the more common brown or black bears. Gor was much, much larger than a big, shaggy Kodiak or ghostwhite polar bear. He stood two or three times the height of the tallest man. His arms could spread the distance of two men placed head to toe. His claws were longer than a man's hand. Gor could not be killed. Many parties of warriors went out to battle him with traps, pit falls, and spears. None returned. He was a spirit with hide so thick it could stop the sharpest obsidian spear. They were unable to trap him, because his giant claws could lift his massive body out of any dead-fall pit or cave.


The paws were powerful enough to snap a tree as thick as a man's leg. No woven rope could hold him. Gor was always hungry and always near by. He followed the band of hunters wherever they camped. If they hid, he caught their scent and dug them out of their holes. He ran them down in the meadows, where he would swat the puny humans to the ground and crush their heads with a single bite. And he was clever. He often laid quietly until darkness fell, then swiftly lumbered into camp and took a human or two for dinner. Some hunters might stop to throw spears or torches at Gor. Others tried to outrun him, but always failed. Their band was growing smaller. But the monstrous bear was relentless.


Although the foregoing recreation was fictitious, Gor was not. Arctodus simus, the giant, short-faced bear of North America, did indeed exist. He roamed the upper reaches of the North American continent from approximately 36,000 Years Before Present to only about 5,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene Age. Arctodus was a contemporary of Ice Age man, the mammoth and other giant mammals. Some scientists believe his presence was an irresistible pressure for early North American man to quickly move south and populate the warmer areas outside the monster bear's range in Central and South America. Arctodus was a giant. His fossilized bones belonged to a beast that towered 12 to 14 feet high when standing upright, 5 or 6 feet high at the shoulder when down on all fours.


Other fossils show he was 80 percent to 120 percent larger than the biggest modern Kodiak bear. Average polar or grizzly bears weigh about 500 pounds. The largest modern male polar bear is recorded at about 900 pounds. The largest Kodiak reached 1,150 pounds. Arctodus was much heavier. He was similar to a grizzly, save for his longer front legs and a pushed-in, shortened, broader muzzle. The Indiana fossil of a medium-sized Arctodus revealed a 9 foot front arm span, and an estimated weight of 2,575 pounds (776 kilograms). Fossils of this bear are a third larger than the Indiana fossil.


Extrapolating these findings, some fossil Arctodus individuals could have reached 3,500 pounds during their lifetimes, triple the size of the largest modern Kodiak bear. If we assume that the population- size range of Arctodus was similar to that of modern bears (some individuals are twice the size of the average bear), then there probably were at least some 5,000 pound bears (twice the size of the Indiana fossil) that stood more than 20 feet tall. Fossils of Arctodus have been found in more than 100 locations, including the Yukon, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Indiana, California, and northern Mexico. These types of slash-marks could have been made with a Clovis paleo-Indian spear point. It may be that the Arctodus-human interchange was not always a one way relationship.


As are modern bears, Arctodus was an omnivore; in other words, he ate everything-plants, as well as animals. Studies of his fossil remains show that he suffered many of the illnesses occurring in mammals today, including man. Because of his size and habitat, painful arthritis and fungal infections were common and, in all probability, kept Arctodus in a continuously irritated, mean mood. The enormous size and frequency of remains are the impressive aspects of this beast. Its wide distribution and physical power probably influenced the rapid human migration to Central and South America. Fossils of large animals are rare, and the recovery of 100 of them indicates a very large population, because only a minute percentage (one in a million) of any group of animals will become fossilized.


There were many Arctodus bears, and as the populations of mammoth, mastodon, giant beaver, musk ox, and sloths disappeared, man became a prime food source. How could such an animal, even if it was big, force large numbers of well-organized (tribal) humans, armed with spears, traps, and knowledge of killing large game such as mammoths, to literally run to safer areas in South America? The answer is quite simple. The bears were tougher than humans. Today, we have little experience in hunting bear with the weapons available to early Asian immigrant hunters.


It is a considerable jump from shooting a 600-pound Kodiak with a high powered, long range, semi-automatic rifle, as compared to running up to the enraged creature and poking a spear or arrow into his tough, thick hide. Even if one were about to penetrate the skin, a 5-inch-thick layer of fat covered the muscle. Five to 8 inches of muscle protected the vulnerable internal organs, so penetration power of a foot or so was necessary to inflict Arctodus with a fatal wound. Such weapon penetration technology was not usually available to the paleo-hunter; even if he chose to commit suicide with a close-contact assault.


The power of bears was well documented by Lewis and Clark in their report to President Jefferson (1807) concerning experiences with relatively small, but newly discovered grizzlies on their expedition to the Pacific coast. Lewis states, "The men, as well as ourselves, were anxious to meet with some of these bears. The Indians give a very formidable account of the strength and ferocity of this animal, which they never dare to attack but in parties of six, eight, or ten persons; and are even then frequently defeated with the loss of one or more of their group members."


On 5 May 1805, Captain Lewis reported a "monster" bear (later weighed at 600 pounds), which required ten shots-five of them through the lungs-to kill it." Even though severely wounded with nine shots from the .69 caliber Harpers-Ferry rifles, the grizzly chased the hunters down a 20-foot perpendicular embankment and into the river. The bear was finally killed with a 10th shot to the head. Such ferocity and danger involving relatively "tiny" bears as experienced in Lewis's report must be multiplied several times over for creatures as big as Arctodus.


Another problem encountered by early man was bear intelligence. The relative brain/body-size ratio of Arctodus was comparable to that of modern bears. This implies that Arctodus probably had the same intelligence of modern bears, who are really quite smart. Some recent news stories coming out of our U. S. national parks illustrate this point. Park bears are generally pests constantly looking for food. Hanging food from campground poles or trees became ineffective when the bears discovered how to chew the ropes and drop the food bags. Metal lockers were installed but the bears learned how to open the locks. Numerous cars were systematically vandalized by some bears who broke windows, tore off the doors, and got into the trunk area by removing the back seats. The record of this activity was a mother bear and her two cubs who "processed" 44 cars in one weekend.


Our Ancient American ancestors faced Arctodus-numerous, giant, ferocious, unstoppable, and intelligent bears. No wonder they quickly moved to Central and South America. They wanted to be out of range from the largest carnivore since the days of the dinosaurs!


For some unknown reason, about 5,000 years ago, Arctodus became extinct. Perhaps the scaled-down versions of flat-faced Arctodus (grizzly brown bears) or pointed-faced black bears were more efficient food gatherers in a post glacial, changing environment. It is also possible that new diseases finished off the big bears. We really do not know, but in the evolutionary-natural selection scheme, smaller-sized game often results in smaller-sized carnivores. Around 5,000 Years Before Present, North American game such as mammoth, musk, and ox, were relatively small. But before then, giant bears roamed North America, and human beings were their prey.

HOLY MONSTERS

If you look closely at the left-hand portal you'll see that one of the saints is holding his head in his hands. This is Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, who died in 273 A.D. According to legend, Roman soldiers tortured Denis near where Notre-Dame now stands and then decapitated him. The legend says that the martyred saint picking up his head and walked almost four miles to the site where the cathedral of St. Denis now stands. Probably the legend was created centuries afterwards St. Denis died. It gave the abbey located at St. Denis a special attraction, and St. Denis became well know among French saints. Wherever you see St. Denis depicted, you will see that he holds his head in his hands

Of course, it is not only monsters who have their heads removed in Anglo- Saxon England. Saints seem likewise prone to this disorder. There are a number of headless saints in the Anglo-Saxon canon, but a single example will suffice to connect monstrosity and sanctity. Ælfric translated into Anglo-Saxon an account of the martyrdom of Saint Edmund, King of East Anglia in the ninth century. Known for his holiness, Edmund was the unfortunate victim of a series of attacks by the Danes in 870. After having been captured and riddled with arrows that failed to kill him, Edmund was decapitated. His head was left in the woods by the Danes. His followers sought him, and found that:

It was a great miracle that a wolf was sent through God's guidance to defend that head day and night against other wild animals. They went out then looking and frequently called out, just as is the custom of those who often go into the woods: "Where are you now, companion?" And that head answered them, saying "here, here, here" as often as any of them called, until they all came, on account of its calling to them. Then the grey wolf who watched over the head lay with his two feet embracing that head, greedy and hungry, but on account of God, he did not dare to taste the head. Instead, he kept it from wild animals. Then they were astonished at the wolf 's shepherding and they carried that saintly head home with them, thanking the Almighty for all his miracles.  

The saint is made headless, like the monsters, but his head-able to speak after being severed from its body-is then protected by a ravenous wolf, an animal associated with violence and death through the trope of the Beasts of Battle.  Why do saints and monsters share this common ground? As Kristeva writes, "the abject is edged with the sublime." Literally, on the Hereford Mappamundi and the Tiberius B. v. Map, the English are `edged' with the monsters of Africa. This zone, which Kristeva might describe as "a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered," is the realm of the abject, the disgusting. If the monsters might be said to live "at civilization's periphery," this is also where the Anglo-Saxons found themselves, beyond the pale, in the margins of the world, surrounded by monsters.

Astronomers detect nearest Earth-like neighbour

Photo: Artist's impression: five planets orbit the star Tau Ceti, which is just 11.9 light-years from Earth. (J Pinfield/RoPACS network/University of Hertfordshire)

By Science Online's Stuart Gary and wires

Scientists have been surprised by the unexpected discovery of a nearby planetary system using a new experimental technique.

The system of five planets - ranging in size from two to six times the Earth's mass - orbit the Sun-like star Tau Ceti, just 12 light years away.

The discovery, reported in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, will make it easier to find smaller, more Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

As well as being the nearest system to the Earth with a Sun-like star, it includes one planet with a mass about five times that of the Earth that is orbiting in the star's habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface.

The new planetary system was discovered using the radial velocity method, which detects the wobble in a star caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

Since 1995, more than 800 exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars other than the Sun.
But most are either uninhabitable gas giants or big rocky worlds that swing so close to their star that they are literally roasted.

The Tau Ceti finding was made by astronomers from Australia, Britain, Chile and the United States.
One of the paper's authors, University of New South Wales astronomer Jonti Horner, says the discovery was serendipity.

"Mikko Tuomi, from the University of Hertfordshire, was looking at new ways to model data to remove unwanted interference and noise generating false signals in our equipment," Dr Horner said.
"This noise can be caused by vibrations in the star due to effects like starquakes and turbulence, as well as instabilities in the equipment itself."

Valuable target

Tau Ceti was selected to calibrate the new technique because it is a very stable star, which after 14 years of study showed no signs of a planetary system.

"Because it's so close, bright and similar to the Sun, it's a particularly valuable target for study," Dr Horner said.

Once all the noise had been accounted for using the new modelling techniques, astronomers detected a signal indicating the presence of a planetary system.

University of NSW astronomer Chris Tinny, a co-author on the paper, says the new technique doubles the sensitivity of detecting planets using the radial velocity method.

Astronomers believe the proximity and brightness of Tau Ceti will allow them to eventually study the atmospheres of the planets in the system.

Gliese 667C

The radial velocity technique has also been used in the discovery of three new planets orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star called Gliese 667C.

The research by University of British Columbia astronomer Philip Gregory includes a planet just over twice the mass of the Earth.

That makes it the lowest mass planet ever detected in a habitable zone.
Gliese 667C is part of a triple star system about 22 light years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius.

Professor Gregory discovered six planets orbiting the red dwarf, which circles about 30 billion kilometres out from a pair of larger Sun-like stars named Gliese 667A and B.

 

ENERGY FROM WIND

Wind is simple air in motion. It is caused by the uneven heating of the earth's surface by the sun. Since the earth's surface is made of very different types of land and water, it absorbs the sun's heat at different rates.

During the day, the air above the land heats up more quickly than the air over water. The warm air over the land expands and rises, and the heavier, cooler air rushes in to take its place, creating winds. At night, the winds are reversed because the air cools more rapidly over land than over water.

In the same way, the large atmospheric winds that circle the earth are created because the land near the earth's equator is heated more by the sun than the land near the North and South Poles.

Today, wind energy is mainly used to generate electricity. Wind is called a renewable energy source because the wind will blow as long as the sun shines.

THE HISTORY OF WIND

Since ancient times, people have harnessed the winds energy. Over 5,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians used wind to sail ships on the Nile River. Later, people built windmills to grind wheat and other grains. The earliest known windmills were in Persia (Iran). These early windmills looked like large paddle wheels. Centuries later, the people of Holland improved the basic design of the windmill. They gave it propeller-type blades, still made with sails. Holland is famous for its windmills.

American colonists used windmills to grind wheat and corn, to pump water, and to cut wood at sawmills. As late as the 1920s, Americans used small windmills to generate electricity in rural areas without electric service. When power lines began to transport electricity to rural areas in the 1930s, local windmills were used less and less, though they can still be seen on some Western ranches.

The oil shortages of the 1970s changed the energy picture for the country and the world. It created an interest in alternative energy sources, paving the way for the re-entry of the windmill to generate electricity. In the early 1980s wind energy really took off in California, partly because of state policies that encouraged renewable energy sources. Support for wind development has since spread to other states, but California still produces more than twice as much wind energy as any other state.

The first offshore wind park in the United States is planned for an area off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts (read an article about the Cape Cod Wind Project).

HOW WIND MACHINES WORK

Like old fashioned windmills, today's wind machines use blades to collect the wind's kinetic energy. Windmills work because they slow down the speed of the wind. The wind flows over the airfoil shaped blades causing lift, like the effect on airplane wings, causing them to turn. The blades are connected to a drive shaft that turns an electric generator to produce electricity.

With the new wind machines, there is still the problem of what to do when the wind isn't blowing. At those times, other types of power plants must be used to make electricity.

Obamadon lizard named after smiling president

Photo: See the resemblance? An artist's impression of Obamadon (foreground) (Carl Buell/Yale University)

Researchers at Yale University in the US have named a newly discovered prehistoric lizard Obamadon gracilis, in honour of US president Barack Obama's toothy grin.

They got the name by combining the Latin "Obamadon" for "Obama's teeth" and "gracilis," which means slender.


"The lizard has these very tall, straight teeth and Obama has these tall, straight incisors and a great smile," Yale palaeontologist Nick Longrich said.


The small, insect-eating lizard was first discovered in eastern Montana in 1974 but a recent re-examination showed the fossil had been wrongly classified as a Leptochamops denticulatus and was, in fact, a new species, researchers told Reuters.


Along with many dinosaurs, the lizard died out about 65 million years ago when a giant asteroid struck earth, scientists say.

Mr Longrich said he waited until after the recent US election to name the dinosaur.

"It would look like we were kicking him when he's down if he lost and we named this extinct lizard after him," he said.


'Romneydon' was never under consideration and 'Clintondon' didn't sound good, he added.


Mr Obama is not the first politician whose name has been used to help classify living organisms.
Megalonyxx jeffersonii, an extinct species of plant-eating ground sloth, was named in honour of president Thomas Jefferson, an amateur palaeontologist who studied the mammal.


In 2005, entomologists named three species of North American slime-mould beetles Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi and Agathidium rumsfeldi after the then-president, vice president and secretary of defence.


And last month scientists named five new species of fish found in the eastern US rivers after Mr Obama, Bill Clinton, Teddy Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore.


Obamadon gracilis was one of nine newly discovered species reported on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


ABC/Reuters

NASA-NOAA Satellite Reveals New Views of Earth at Night

This image of the continental United States at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The image was made possible by the satellite's "day-night band" of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires and reflected moonlight. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC

Many satellites are equipped to look at Earth during the day, when they can observe our planet fully illuminated by the sun. With a new sensor aboard the NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite launched last year, scientists now can observe Earth's atmosphere and surface during nighttime hours.

The new sensor, the day-night band of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), is sensitive enough to detect the nocturnal glow produced by Earth's atmosphere and the light from a single ship in the sea. Satellites in the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program have been making observations with low-light sensors for 40 years. But the VIIRS day-night band can better detect and resolve Earth's night lights.

The new, higher resolution composite image of Earth at night was released at a news conference at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. This and other VIIRS day-night band images are providing researchers with valuable data for a wide variety of previously unseen or poorly seen events.

"For all the reasons that we need to see Earth during the day, we also need to see Earth at night," said Steve Miller, a researcher at NOAA's Colorado State University Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere. "Unlike humans, the Earth never sleeps."

The day-night band observed Hurricane Sandy, illuminated by moonlight, making landfall over New Jersey on the evening of Oct. 29. Night images showed the widespread power outages that left millions in darkness in the wake of the storm. With its night view, VIIRS is able to detect a more complete view of storms and other weather conditions, such as fog, that are difficult to discern with infrared, or thermal, sensors. Night is also when many types of clouds begin to form.  
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Mishipeshu, the Horned Water Panther

Mishipeshu by Firenze

Great cats are usually not thought of as especially good swimmers, much less water dwellers. But one of the major players in the creature lore of North America's Ojibwe and Cree people is Mishipeshu, the great water lynx or water panther. Its name has been spelled in myriad ways due to its wide territory, and descriptions can vary, but these tribes believed it to be the special guardian of the ancient copper mines of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Its home was Michipicoten Island, and taking any of the pure chunks of copper ore from that island was considered strictly taboo. One oft-repeated story is of four Ojibwe who tried to steal copper from Mishipeshu, only to be followed home by the screaming water panther. The trip was fatal for all four thieves.


The curse of Mishipeshu continued as Europeans discovered the fortune in copper nuggets on the Upper Peninsula in the mid-1800s. Ships carrying copper would capsize in sudden storms, such as the one that sank the Algoma in 1885 with 45 people aboard. The storms, the Ojibwe believed, were stirred purposely by Mishipeshu. Ten ships were sunk in the area of Isle Royale alone.


Mishipeshu is not alone in his quest to guard the sacred copper. Mishi Ginabig, a serpent-like creature that bore antler-like horns and measured the same length as the tallest pine trees, was reportedly spotted in the Great Lakes area in the early 1800s. Both Mishipeshu and Mishi Ginabig are enemies of the great Thunderbird, a spirit-being in the shape of a giant bird, which battles them to restore balance between powers of the water and of the air.

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