Everything Old is New Again

By Claire Eamer

An atlatl is a throwing stick. It’s a tool used to extend the reach and flexibility of a hunter’s arm so that he or she can throw a light spear farther, harder, and faster. And very accurately. The word atlatl comes from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, who used atlatls in hunting and war.

A model at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria, shows an ancient
hunter using a simple atlatl and dart. Photo by Wolfgang Sauber.

At its simplest, an atlatl is a stick with a hook at one end. The hook fits into a dimple in the base of the spear – usually called a dart. The hunter holds the atlatl and dart in one hand, sweeps both forward in a throwing motion, and lets the dart fly.

Atlatl throwing. Illustration by Drew Shannon for
Out of the Ice: How Climate Change is Revealing the Past (Kids Can Press, 2018)

Sounds simple, but it’s so effective that people on all continents have used atlatls for thousands of years, and many still use them. Although it has been overshadowed in most cultures by the bow and arrow and by firearms, an atlatl is still a cheap, easy-to-make, and easy-to-use hunting weapon. All you really need to make one is a small knife and a straight-ish stick.

These two atlatls, currently in the Houston Museum of Natural Science, are
between 12,000 and 17,000 years old. They were found in caves or rock shelters in France.
The animal carved on the lower atlatl has been identified as a hyena. Claire Eamer photo.

Of course, not all atlatls are simple sticks. Humans like to embellish their tools. A couple of atlatls found in dry caves in France have carved images of animals that have been extinct in Europe for thousands of years. An Aztec atlatl in the British Museum is elaborately carved with images of warriors or gods and covered with gold.

I first heard about atlatls in the late 1990s, when I lived in the Yukon. A friend, Environment Canada caribou biologist Don Russell, was asked to confirm discovery of what appeared to be huge quantities of caribou droppings melting out of a high alpine ice patch near Whitehorse. (For the full story, see my book Out of the Ice: How Climate Change is Revealing the Past.)

Dimples in the ends of atlatl darts.
Illustration by Drew Shannon for
Out of the Ice: How Climate Change is
Revealing the Past (Kids Can Press, 2018)

Don spotted something odd lying on the rocks beside the ice patch. It was a stick. Far above treeline, with no other wood around, he found a stick – with what looked like string wrapped around it and a tattered bit of feather.

“Cool,” said the archaeologists (more or less), when presented with the stick. “Part of an arrow, maybe even a century old. Very rare.” But testing showed it was even cooler. The stick was 4300 years old, and it wasn’t an arrow. The tell-tale dimple at one end showed that it was the remains of an atlatl dart. Long ago, around the time that ancient Britons were building Stonehenge, a hunter in the Yukon mountains flung a dart at a caribou – and missed. The dart disappeared into the snow and ice where the cold preserved it.

That was the first direct evidence of atlatl use in the Yukon. Wood normally disintegrates in a few years unless it’s preserved in some way – usually by extreme dryness or extreme cold. Cold is what saved the Yukon atlatl dart, and it has preserved other things too. Lots more wooden artifacts, including the rest of the dart Don found, have been discovered in the ice patches, as well as bone, antler, leather, and other materials that normally don’t survive for thousands of years. 

Kids choose their weapons at the atlatl range at the
Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in Whitehorse.
Yukon Government photo.

Today, most school kids in the Yukon know about atlatls and might even have tried their hand at them. Elsewhere, too, people are experimenting with atlatls. There are even formal atlatl competitions and modern atlatl hunters. It is, indeed, a case of “Everything old is new again.”

Ready to throw at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre's atlatl target range.
Yukon Government photo

If you want to know more about the Yukon Ice Patches and see some of the finds, check out The Frozen Past, an illustrated booklet produced by the Yukon Government and the First Nations involved in the ice patch research.

If you'd like to see video of people throwing atlatls, here is the 2012 Atlatl Competition at Anasazi State Park Museum in the United States.


And, of course, you can always consult my own book -- Out of the Ice: How Climate Change is Revealing the Past (Kids Can Press, 2018) -- for the story of the Yukon discoveries and frozen discoveries elsewhere in the world.

A Frozen World Returns

By Claire Eamer

The wolf pup cleaned, preserved, and ready for display.
Yukon Government photo.

More than 50,000 years ago, when most of Canada was buried under kilometres-thick ice sheets, a wolf pup was born in one of the few places untouched by the ice -- a dry, grassy plain that extended across most of what is now the Yukon. No more than eight weeks later, the little wolf died, probably buried in a landslip and smothered while it slept in its den. The cold muck froze around it and stayed frozen, summer and winter, preserving the small body.

Just over two years ago, on July 13, 2016, gold miners on Last Chance Creek near Dawson City washed away some frozen sediment and found the little pup. It was frozen and dried but still remarkably well preserved. The miners immediately called in palaeontologist Grant Zazula and his colleagues in the Yukon government's Palaeontology Program. They were delighted with the find. To his knowledge, it's the only ice-age wolf ever found, Zazula says.

Only half of the caribou calf's body was found.
Yukon Government photo.

That was the second spectacular find of the 2016 summer. Six weeks earlier, miners on Paradise Hill -- another famous location in the historic Klondike Goldfields -- had discovered the frozen and mummified remains of a caribou calf. It wasn't as complete as the wolf pup, but nearly all of the front half of the body had survived, with skin, muscle, and hair intact.

Zazula and his colleagues knew they had something special, but they didn't realise quite how special until the results of radiocarbon dating came back. Both animals lived more than 50,000 years ago, the limit for radiocarbon dating. And the caribou calf had been found in association with a layer of volcanic ash that had settled to the ground about 80,000 years ago.

Yukon government palaeontologists Grant Zazula and Elizabeth Hall excavate
the caribou calf from the frozen muck of Paradise Hill near Dawson City, Yukon.
Yukon Government photo

Specimens that old are rare anywhere, and especially in the Yukon where the undulating landscape left few places for dead animals to lie and freeze undisturbed. There was no rush to preserve the bodies, Zazula says.

"We had them kicking around in our deep freeze for a couple of months. They were very well freeze-dried already."

The wolf pup's head before preservation, ice crystals visible.
Yukon Government photo

However, if anyone other than experts was going to see them, more work was required. Yukon Heritage applied for help from the experts at the Canadian Conservation Institute. And they got it. Today, both small bodies have been carefully thawed and preserved in a way that will make it possible to display them to the public. They are currently on display in Dawson at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, in whose traditional territory they were found. Later this fall, they will be moved to Whitehorse and a permanent display at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre.

Meanwhile, scientific interest is building. Zazula is fielding calls from Pleistocene scholars around the world and brainstorming with them and his Yukon colleagues about what kind of questions the little corpses might answer. Is the wolf pup related to the wolves that live in the Yukon today, or did the Pleistocene wolf disappear to be replaced by a new population? Does the caribou calf have relatives living today? If so, which of the many caribou herds do they belong to? And that's just the beginning.

The thawing permafrost and melting ice of the world are revealing more and more clues to the past, both animal and human. That's the subject of my latest book, Out of the Ice: How Climate Change is Revealing the Past. The Yukon pup and calf are too recent to make it into the book, but it contains plenty of other fascinating evidence of lost or forgotten worlds.