DISCOVERIES
THE ICE MAN
CAMETH TO VERO
28
ED DRONDOSKI
The discovery of an etching carved on a
13,000-year-old bone may the oldest piece
of art in North America
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
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James Kennedy stands beside a 13,000-year-old bone etched with the figure of a mammoth. He says he discovered the bone in Vero Beach and kept it
under his sink for years until he discovered the etching on it last year. Some scientists believe it may be the oldest example of art in North America.