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reviewjoumal.com -- News: After 50 years, Tule Springs still fascinates Page 2 of 3T ssrsfi— N ew York, Denver and Arizona. As the students and scientists walked through the high-walled, mile-long trench Friday, Robert Orlins, a member o f the 1962 Expedition, remembered how Tule Springs had captured the attention o f prominent paleontologists and archaeologists. '1 realized when I got here and saw the size o f the crew and the level o f expertise... you knew this was big stuff. This was really an important investigation," Orlins said. "After more than 40 years later, people still dunk it’s important. That's what blows me away, is the continued interest in the site." If the team had found a stone spear point lodged in the fossilized bones o f one o f these beasts, an argument could be made that humans lived in the area perhaps three times earlier than 13,000 years ago, the era generally accepted for people arriving in North America from Siberia across the Bering land bridge. As it turned out, the team o f about 25 scientists found plenty o f fossils from extinct animals. They found only a handful o f artifacts - a drilled stone, bone aw l and polished tusk fragment - from mueh younger soils, none o f which could be linked to more ancient times. And the charcoal was found to be carbonized plant remains, which later proved important in dating soil layers. Finding no human link to the extinct animals was nevertheless significant, Rozaire said. "There's a certain disappointment, but on the other hand to know there wasn't a 40,000-year-old man was important," he said. Historically, the 1962 Tule Springs expedition marked a milestone in demonstrating chemist W illard Libby’s radiocarbon age-dating technique, for which he had w on a Nobel Prize. Asked how scientists know there weren't humans in North America before 13,000 years ago, Orlins said, "We don't. W e don't have the evidence yet" However, he said, some day a man-made tool or projectile point could turn up in extinct animal fossils from an earlier period. Meanwhile, w ork continues in the vicinity o f Tule Springs by a California team from the San Bernardino County Museum led by curators Kathleen Springer and Eric Scott. Scott said the team discovered 438 fossil sites in the area and is analyzing them to find out what the animals ate and how their numbers changed over time, O f particular interest are mammoths, each of which ate 700 pounds o f vegetation per day. The research could shed light on how climate change played a role in the animals' demise. 'W hen climate changed at the end o f the Ice Age, there was less water," Scott said. "The plants took a hit, and then the animals cook a hit." Find this article at: http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/May-16-Mon-2005/news/265177… I Check the box to include the list of links referenced in the article. http://reviewjoumal.printthis.dickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=r…... 5/17/2005