John Hebior, a 76-year-old retired farmer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, leads a pretty normal life. Except in the basement of his farmhouse he has a mammoth skeleton that he’s looking to sell. “It’s all crated up, but it still takes up a lot of room—about a 12-by-12-foot square,” he says.
Back in 1976, Hebior’s son stumbled over a peculiarly large bone in the middle of a cornfield. The family wondered about it for a bit and then forgot about it until 1993, when archaeologists led by David Overstreet of Marquette University were excavating a mammoth skeleton on a neighbor’s land. Hebior showed the bone to the neighbor, who showed it to Overstreet, who began excavating Hebior’s land. Overstreet never found the rest of that mammoth, but he did turn up another—one of the largest and most complete mammoth skeletons ever found.
Even more astounding, Overstreet also found stone tools and cut ...
