VERMILLION, S.D. -- So what are your summer vacation plans? A trip to the beach? The lake? Hitting a major tourist destination like Washington, D.C.?
Tim Heaton will probably see a little bit of beach, and he'll undoubtedly see plenty of water. But he definitely won't be bumping into fellow tourists.
If he's lucky, he'll get to crawl into dark, damp, previously undiscovered caves on a remote island in southeast Alaska. It's in those caves that Heaton hopes to find ancient animal bones that could help solve the mysteries of the Ice Age.
"We're trying to put together an expedition to continue searching for the next jackpot," said Heaton, an earth science professor and chairman of the University of South Dakota's Department of Earth Sciences and Physics.
He's hit that proverbial jackpot before.
During five years of excavations in the not-so-exotic-sounding On Your Knees Cave -- a place so remote that supplies had to be dropped in by helicopter -- Heaton and teams of students and scientists found animal bones that give insight into the Ice Age, which lasted from 2 million to 10,000 years ago.
By dating bones he finds, Heaton can learn about the Ice Age by seeing which animals were in southeast Alaska, and which weren't, at given points in time.
"My main objective was to find out what happened during the Ice Age. Did the glaciers wipe everything out and provide a fresh start for animals or were there animals living there?"
During his excavations, Heaton unexpectedly helped shed light on another mystery. In 1996, he uncovered a human jawbone, ribs and vertebrae. Nearly 10 years later, scientists were able to extract DNA from a tooth and determine the bones were nearly 11,000 years old. It's the oldest human DNA ever found in North America, a discovery so significant that Discover magazine ranked it 32nd out of the 100 top science stories in 2007.
"It's kind of one piece of the bigger puzzle of how people came to America," said Heaton, who has trekked to Alaska every summer but two since arriving at USD in 1991.
Heaton called the discovery accidental. His real interest is uncovering animal bones.
That passion sprung from a natural interest in exploring caves while growing up in the shadows of the Wasatch Range in Utah.
"I just loved the outdoors. I lived near the mountains, so I walked up and did a lot of exploring. That partly led to my interest in geology. Then when I realized there were caves filled with bones, that led me into paleontology."
And when friends from Utah moved to Alaska and began finding caves with bones in them, it was as if Heaton gained a whole new research lab.
"When I learned there were caves containing bones from the Ice Age, it was a marriage of all my interests."
The offspring of that marriage is a wealth of knowledge. Bones found inside On Your Knees Cave, which got its name from the narrow openings and corridors that prevented explorers from standing up inside, showed that animals previously thought to be absent during the Ice Age had, indeed, lived there.
"It was sort of a window to things being much more active than had previously been thought," Heaton said of his findings.
In five years of summer excavations, Heaton and others scooped out 5,000 1-gallon bags of sediment, sifted through them and cataloged 50,000 bones, some of them more than 50,000 years old.
"A lot of my work since then has been trying to find another cave as good as On Your Knees. I haven't found any as good."
But he'll keep looking.
He and friends in Alaska will continue that search this summer. They'll find caves, Heaton said, they always do. But whether they contain the bones worthy of a large-scale excavation project remains to be seen.
Nonetheless, they'll wind their way through densely forested terrain, probably spend a week without showering, keeping an eye out for holes in the earth.
It's no day at the beach, but for Heaton, it's much more fun.
To read more about Heaton, his research and his explorations in southeast Alaska, visit his Web site at www.usd.edu/esci/alaska.
www.siouxcityjournal.com
Tim Heaton will probably see a little bit of beach, and he'll undoubtedly see plenty of water. But he definitely won't be bumping into fellow tourists.
If he's lucky, he'll get to crawl into dark, damp, previously undiscovered caves on a remote island in southeast Alaska. It's in those caves that Heaton hopes to find ancient animal bones that could help solve the mysteries of the Ice Age.
"We're trying to put together an expedition to continue searching for the next jackpot," said Heaton, an earth science professor and chairman of the University of South Dakota's Department of Earth Sciences and Physics.
He's hit that proverbial jackpot before.
During five years of excavations in the not-so-exotic-sounding On Your Knees Cave -- a place so remote that supplies had to be dropped in by helicopter -- Heaton and teams of students and scientists found animal bones that give insight into the Ice Age, which lasted from 2 million to 10,000 years ago.
By dating bones he finds, Heaton can learn about the Ice Age by seeing which animals were in southeast Alaska, and which weren't, at given points in time.
"My main objective was to find out what happened during the Ice Age. Did the glaciers wipe everything out and provide a fresh start for animals or were there animals living there?"
During his excavations, Heaton unexpectedly helped shed light on another mystery. In 1996, he uncovered a human jawbone, ribs and vertebrae. Nearly 10 years later, scientists were able to extract DNA from a tooth and determine the bones were nearly 11,000 years old. It's the oldest human DNA ever found in North America, a discovery so significant that Discover magazine ranked it 32nd out of the 100 top science stories in 2007.
"It's kind of one piece of the bigger puzzle of how people came to America," said Heaton, who has trekked to Alaska every summer but two since arriving at USD in 1991.
Heaton called the discovery accidental. His real interest is uncovering animal bones.
That passion sprung from a natural interest in exploring caves while growing up in the shadows of the Wasatch Range in Utah.
"I just loved the outdoors. I lived near the mountains, so I walked up and did a lot of exploring. That partly led to my interest in geology. Then when I realized there were caves filled with bones, that led me into paleontology."
And when friends from Utah moved to Alaska and began finding caves with bones in them, it was as if Heaton gained a whole new research lab.
"When I learned there were caves containing bones from the Ice Age, it was a marriage of all my interests."
The offspring of that marriage is a wealth of knowledge. Bones found inside On Your Knees Cave, which got its name from the narrow openings and corridors that prevented explorers from standing up inside, showed that animals previously thought to be absent during the Ice Age had, indeed, lived there.
"It was sort of a window to things being much more active than had previously been thought," Heaton said of his findings.
In five years of summer excavations, Heaton and others scooped out 5,000 1-gallon bags of sediment, sifted through them and cataloged 50,000 bones, some of them more than 50,000 years old.
"A lot of my work since then has been trying to find another cave as good as On Your Knees. I haven't found any as good."
But he'll keep looking.
He and friends in Alaska will continue that search this summer. They'll find caves, Heaton said, they always do. But whether they contain the bones worthy of a large-scale excavation project remains to be seen.
Nonetheless, they'll wind their way through densely forested terrain, probably spend a week without showering, keeping an eye out for holes in the earth.
It's no day at the beach, but for Heaton, it's much more fun.
To read more about Heaton, his research and his explorations in southeast Alaska, visit his Web site at www.usd.edu/esci/alaska.
www.siouxcityjournal.com
