THE ICE MAN CAMETH TO VERO

BY WILLI MILLER

When James Kennedy was a teenager, his pastime of choice was fishing for tarpon near a spillway behind a local hardware store and lumberyard in Vero Beach. When he came across an old concrete-mixing tub one day, he cleaned it out to use as a boat to get closer to the spillway and the fish. For an anchor, Kennedy tied a rope around a rock. As he hauled the anchor and dropped it into the water over and over, the young fisherman noticed that it no longer looked like the rock he began with — and indeed it wasn’t. It was identified as the tooth of one of the mammoths that were known to live in this area thousands of years ago.

That knowledge was all the young man needed to shift his interest from fish to fossils. Through the years, Kennedy, now 39, collected boxes of interesting bones and teeth. “I like to give them to kids; they’re fascinated by them,” he says. A few of the boxes of shards were stored under his kitchen sink for years until he decided to take them to a flea market last year. “I was rinsing them off and something caught my eye,” he says.

What caught his eye is possibly the first art ever discovered in North America, says Kevin Jones, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Florida. Jones is one of four panelists invited to participate in a March presentation at the Emerson Center in Vero Beach on Kennedy’s Ice Age discovery.

Kennedy took his find to local fossil collector Gene Roddenberry who, in turn, contacted the Florida Museum of Natural History. From there the call went out to Dr. Barbara Purdy, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Florida, another of the panelists. Purdy says, “Nothing like it has ever been found in Florida before. Its presence indicates that people were creating artistic impressions of the animals they hunted more than 13,000 years ago. … We knew people were here because of stone and bone implements [that have been found]. We did not know they were creating works of art.”

Exhaustive investigation and testing are required to convince the scientific community that something as unique as the Kennedy fossil is the real deal. Purdy says, “Until every skeptical person in the world has a chance to view the engraved bone, there will always be doubters. However, based on the techniques and analyses at the University of Florida, the incising looks genuine. I was skeptical myself at first and set out to prove the specimen was a fake.” That, she and her colleagues have been unable to do.

The Old Vero Ice Age Sites committee, supported by the Cultural Council and Historical Society in Indian River County, partnered with the Florida Humanities Council to bring information on the bone and the ancient history of Vero Beach to the public through the panel presentation and a “Fossil Road Show.”

Other experts who weighed in on the authenticity of the bone and its etching are Dr. Richard Hulbert, paleontologist with the University of Florida, and Dr. Thomas Stafford, president of Stafford Research Laboratories in Lafayette, Colo. Hulbert and his UF colleagues used a mass spectrometer to compare the bone with others collected in Vero. “It matched,” Hulbert says, “so it did not come from the Old World. Prior to this discovery it is well established that humans arrived in North America [including Florida] about 12 to 13,000 years ago … . A few fossils with abstract markings (such as zigzag lines) made by man had been found, but this is the first realistic drawing.”

The drawing would have been made by an object harder than the bone itself, Stafford says, possibly “chert, obsidian, flint, quartzite or (something) of similar hardness.” Stafford was involved in the Rare Earth Analysis of the find. “Because the bone was found in Florida, it is likely the animal is a Columbian mammoth ... . It could also be mastodon, which is actually more common in Florida than mammoths,” he says. “However, no one knows what species the bone represents. DNA or protein analyses could help with this determination, but the hot temperatures and high rainfall in Florida preclude recovering DNA except under extremely rare conditions.’’

The future of the bone is uncertain at this time, although it is scheduled to go to auction this spring. Kennedy doesn’t know where his find will end up, but when it has been sold, he plans to move closer to his family in Alabama and see what treasures the Alabama soil might be willing to surrender.