Fortean honey trap

"Ice Age Death Trap" is a very respectable PBS-National Geographic documentary and part of the NOVA science series. It follows a group of excavators at Snowmass in Colorado, as they are unearthing ancient mammal fossils from the bottom of an old lake. Most of the stuff shown is pretty conventional. If you're first love is mastodon bones, brace yourself for a treat.

The program is topped off by a sensational find: a mammoth carcass which seems to have been anchored to the bottom of the lake by boulders. This was standard practice among Paleo-Indians, but there is one problem: the mammoth remains are believed to be over 40,000 years old. However, according to conventional wisdom, humans didn't reach the Americas until about 15,000 years ago. Weirdly, this find is not discussed at the official site of the dig, the Snowmastodon Project. Too hot?

Since mastodons frankly aren't my cup of tea (or first love), I found "Ice Age Death Trap" pretty boring, until the pre-Clovis discovery. Fortean honey traps can show up in the most unexpected of places. Even at Snowmass, Colorado.