Archaeology by Prau123 – Page 181 – Main Forum

Prau123 · 2020-04-23T00:56:31Z

Here's an update on some of the new discoveries in recent years in the Mesoamerican region. Tonina - Considered the new tallest structure in Mesoamerica. It's debatable since El Mirador is actually 172 meters tall. The largest structure is still Cholula. There are still several areas in the El Mirador Basin that needs to be excavated and measured. There are 61,000 plus sites that were scanned a few years ago and that was only a mere portion of the El Mirador Basin. 15 facts about the Maya Civilization 1. THEIR PYRAMIDS AND CITIES ARE STILL BEING DISCOVERED.It’s amazing to think that something as large as a pyramid could elude archaeologists today. But it was only a few years ago that a Maya pyramid more than 1000 years old was discovered at Toniná in the Mexican state of Chiapas. It had been hidden under what was believed to be a natural hill. In 2015, researchers said this newfound monument was actually Mexico’s tallest pyramid at 246 feet (75 meters) in height, surpassing the 213-foot Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan. The ruins of two Maya cities concealed by thick vegetation were also recently discovered in Mexico’s state of Campeche. Tonina Picture They also found El Palmar and Angamuco a few years ago also. El Palmar - El Palmar is 40 to 70 times larger than previously acknowledged. It’s 40 times larger than we thought it was,” Garrison says. “This is now this huge city that would have been a rival to Tikal An early city called El Palmar seemed now to be 70 times larger than we had suspected, with raised fields for agriculture. An “isolated” royal palace had an extensive swath of settlement extending a kilometer or more. Angamuco - Angamuco had as many buildings as Manhattan city. A new laser-mapping technology, called lidar, has been used to confirm a truly mind-blowing ancient city buried in western Mexico. Called Angamuco, researchers say that it has about 40,000 buildings. This is around the same amount of building foundations as there are in Manhattan, New York. Whoa! El Mirador - Articles: Videos:

Some massive tunnels, which scientists think were dug by a giant sloth, were discovered in Brazil. Scientists call these tunnels ‘palaeoburrows’. They are so huge that even they are higher than people’s height. Many of these tunnels stretch for hundreds of feet and have numerous branches, and the largest one is a whopping 2,000 feet long, six feet tall and up to five feet wide!

The largest tunnel is a whopping 2,000 feet long, six feet tall and up to five feet wide

Geology professor Heinrich Frank speculated that these massive tunnels must have been dug out by a living thing. “There’s no geological process in the world that produces long tunnels with a circular or elliptical cross-section, which branch and rise and fall, with claw marks on the walls,” Frank told Discover. Whatever the enormous creature was, it left huge claw marks across the walls and ceiling of this tunnel and others of similar size found in the area.

There are huge claw marks across the walls

Until today, Frank and other researchers have found over 1,500 massive tunnels in the state of Rio Grande do Sul alone, as well as hundreds more in Santa Catarina. Frank wrote “In these burrows, sometimes you get the feeling that there’s some creature waiting around the next curve – that’s how much it feels like a prehistoric animal den,”

Eventually, he did find enough evidence to convince him that the paleoburrows were most probably dug by the giant ground sloth, the second-largest prehistoric land mammal next to the mammoth. The primary evidence is the deep claw marks found by Frank on the walls of paleoburrows. Most scientists now agree that they could only have been made by a giant ground sloth.

Paleoburrows were most probably dug by the giant ground sloth

Megatherium americanum is the scientific name for an extinct species of giant ground sloth. The name means ‘great beast from America’. But despite these creatures stretching up to 4.6 meters (15 feet) and weighing roughly 2,590 kg (5,709 pounds), a single ground sloth would have spent much of its lifespan dedicated entirely to constructing tunnels as large and extensive as these palaeoburrows are. So why bother?

Frank and his team are unsure whether the extensive caverns were used to escape the climate, predators, or humidity, but then even those explanations seem unlikely. After all, a much smaller burrow would have suited those purposes just fine, wouldn’t it?

Could it be that several individuals inherited the burrows over generations, and kept adding to the structure to make it so enormous. Again, that’s something the researchers will need to confirm through further observations.

Discovered in 1787 by Manuel Torres in Argentina, the first M. americanum fossils were shipped to the Museo Nacional de Ciencias in Madrid, where the original skeleton is still on display.

In 1796, comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier determined the relationships and appearance of Megatherium, establishing it was a sloth. At first, he believed that the animal used its enormous claws to climb trees, like modern sloths, but he later changed his hypothesis to support a subterranean lifestyle, with the claws used to dig tunnels.

Megatherium americanum was up to 10 times the size of living sloths reaching weights of up to four tonnes (similar to a present day bull elephant).

*Model of a Megatherium at Crystal Palace, London. Image credits:* Jim Linwood / failing_angel

Despite its enormous claws, M. americanum was a vegetarian. This has been confirmed through chemical analysis of the animal’s teeth which shed light on what it ate during life. And it could have also meant that it was an easier target for – humans.

Yes, we do know they overlapped with humans in time as Megatherium fossils have been found with cut marks on them. This suggests that these giant sloths were on the menu thousands of years ago, which could have contributed to their extinction.