Who Killed Hollywood's La Brea Woman?Prepared by Harold Stephens
Travel Correspondent for Thai Airways International
Interested in unsolved mysteries? The next time you take a THAI flight to Los Angeles you might want to investigate one that has baffled the city for the past couple decades. It concerns the mysterious death of the La Brea woman.
The authorities have no clue how she was killed, or by what means. They're pretty certain she was murdered. Her body was found in a shallow grave just north of Wilshire Boulevard and about a half mile west of La Brea Avenue. The one thing they are sure about, and it took carbon dating to prove it, is that she died some 9,000 years ago. What makes this case so interesting is that she is the oldest human specimen ever discovered in Southern California.
The site where she was found is the famous La Brea Tar Pits, about six miles to the west of the heart of America's second largest city. You may hear tales that Hollywood is populated by some old dinosaurs, still living, but this find is quite another thing. The "tar pits," formerly mined for natural asphalt, have yielded an incredibly rich treasure trove of fossils up to 40,000 years in age. Here huge mammoths, fierce saber-toothed cats, packs of dire wolves, and hosts of birds became trapped and entombed. Sharing their fate were many other creatures ranging from tiny insects to bizarre giant ground sloths.
Scientists have recovered almost 1.5 million vertebrate and 2.5 million invertebrate fossils from the deposits. In all, some 140 species of plants and more than 420 species of animals are now known from La Brea.
For those interested in prehistoric times, a visit to the Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries near the tar pits gives a picture of the diversity of Ice Age life in southern California. The La Brea fossils that are exhibited and stored in the museum are a unique natural resource, a window into the life that existed long before movie stars and producers appeared on the scene.
La Brea Tar Pits are more than a museum; they are a continuing process of discovery. In various pits through the gardens, bones continually surface from their tar graves below.
For two months each summer, visitors can view excavation of material from Pit 91, one of the richest fossil deposits in the world. Early excavators focused their attention on the bones of the largest, most spectacular mammals and birds and large pieces of fossil wood. But in 1969 the staff of the Natural History Museum began a new excavation of Pit 91, seeking to recover a greater diversity of specimens.
Many of the smaller sorts of La Brea fossils—seeds and pollen, insects and mollusks, fish, amphibians, and small birds and rodents—are best known from this excavation. Because plants and small animals are more geographically restricted to particular habitats than larger mammals and birds, their remains provide the most reliable evidence of past environmental conditions.
The La Brea fossils appear to have been preserved by a unique combination of rapid sedimentation and asphalt impregnation. Asphalt seeped to the surface primarily during warm summer weather. The resulting shallow puddles were often concealed by a surface coating of wind-blown leaves and dust.
Occasionally, an unwary animal became trapped by the asphalt. Its struggles and ultimate death in turn lured carnivores and scavengers, such as big cats and condors, to their fate. The bodies soon decayed, and individual bones rotted free, became saturated with asphalt, and settled at least part way into the mire. During the winter, cool temperatures solidified the asphalt, and rainwater-choked streams deposited a layer of sediment over the exposed bones. The warm weather of early summer then dried the streams and liquefied the asphalt, resetting the trap.
The Page Museum itself is a research and an educational facility, and the fossil storage areas and paleontology laboratory are both in full public view* so that visitors can observe the cleaning, preparation, cataloging, and study of Rancho La Brea fossils.
Many of the exhibits are designed with children in mind; they are invited to view an animated model of a juvenile mammoth, to pit their strength against the pull of asphalt, and to touch the massive, asphalt-soaked bone of a giant ground sloth.
The idea of locating a museum on this site was first proposed by Captain G. Allan Hancock who deeded Rancho La Brea to the County of Los Angeles in 1916. When entrepreneur and philanthropist George C. Page turned his talents toward financing, designing, and constructing the Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries in 1972, the idea became reality. Today, the extensive collections from La Brea are stored and featured in impressive exhibits in the museum, which opened in 1977 as a satellite of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
A startling introduction to the collection, and for all to see driving along Wilshire Boulevard, are the reconstructed monsters that are perennially trapped in the pits out in front of the museum, including an elephant-like mammoth with her giant pretzel tusks.
According to the findings, the great mammals were not necessarily swallowed up in the pits but were stuck on the surface tar like flies on flypaper. They died in anguish, leaving their bones for schoolchildren to examine today, 40,000 years later. Seeing the giant mammals struggling in the tar lakes, one can almost hear their bellowing in the Wilshire Boulevard traffic that goes on today.
We can only imagine the scene—a saber-toothed tiger slinking across a barren field to attack a trapped and helpless antelope stuck in the tar. The cat in turn gets stuck and then is devoured by dire wolves or by great buzzards that flap in to tear at his flesh. Wolves and buzzards also became stuck in the tar, leaving their own bones for modern paleontologists to pick at.
Inside the museum, the bones of several large mammals have been lovingly reconstructed, awesome in their size and weaponry. An Imperial mammoth stands 13 feet high. Two saber-tooths play with their cubs, their 10-inch incisors looking ferocious even in domesticity.
A Western horse (now extinct) has been reconstituted around its bones; a wall contains many skulls of the 1,600 dire wolves whose bones have been recovered.
Wall murals seek to portray the landscape as it might have looked 40,000 years ago. It was very much then as it is today with mountains above a broad plain leveling off to the sea. A zoo of prehistoric animals is shown: camels, zebra-like horses, mammoths, mastodons, bears, ground sloths, wolves and bison.
One exhibit shows the bones and painted representation of numerous bird carnivores, somehow looking even more bloodthirsty than the sabertooths. If the tar didn't get you, the buzzards would.
While the wealth of fossils mined from the pits is fabulous, diggers have turned up only 58 artifacts, from 4,000 to 9,000 years old. Most were related to asphalt mining. Elk antlers were used as asphalt picks. There were no elk in Southern California, so the aborigines evidently traded asphalt for elk antlers from the San Joaquin Valley, where elk still live today.
Still to be solved is the mystery of the La Brea Woman. I thought about her as I walked up Sunset Boulevard later that night. It's hard to imagine, when all the neons are lighting up the streets and sleek automobiles cruise up and down the wide avenue, that at one time in our distant past the world of Hollywood was much different. Or was it? Was the La Brea woman murdered and we can't help wondering why? What was her crime? Or was she an innocent victim of violence? Could sex and violence then, as it is today in Hollywood, be the cause of her downfall? Was she the victim of a jealous lover or husband?
We will never know the answer, but we do know the importance of the fossils recovered from La Brea, and of the deposits that remain in and around the area, cannot be overestimated. They hold the answers to many questions about the surroundings in which the first human immigrants to North America found themselves.
The La Brea Tar Pits and the Page Museum are located in Hancock Park at 5801 Wilshire Boulevard, six miles west of downtown Los Angeles. Hours are l0 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; the museum is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's days and Mondays—except nationally celebrated Monday holidays.
Children under five are always admitted free and admission is free to everyone on the second Tuesday of each month.
THAI flies to Los Angeles and if you sign up for a ROH tour you will have time to visit the tar pits.
Next week we will travel to Papua New Guinea looking for some unique adventure.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Q. Dear Mr. Stephens. Greetings from Singapore. We, my wife and I, are back from the wilds of Cambodia, and we want to share an oddity we discovered. Just what it is, I am not sure, but I must admit that, for a moment, I pictured myself a new Indiana Jones. On a wall of the Ta Prothm Temple, near Siem Reap (northeast of Angkor Wat),
I found a carving of what looks like a Stegasaurus. Stegasauri were herbivorous dinosaurs which lived about 140 million to 65 million years ago. They almost certainly didn't make it into our modern era. I say almost, since what was carved on the sandstone of Ta Prothm Temple looks pretty convincing. I was told by our guide that dragons such as this one portrayed, used to inhabit the forests. However, not any longer, I was assurred.
Does anyone have any idea of what is carved on the stone of Temple Ta Prothm? Whatever it is, it's all rather mysterious. To me, at least. Your speculations or additional information would be gratefully accepted. —Jeff and Jennifer Berry
A. Dear Jeff. Maybe a reader might have some insight on the carvings. I myself found your e-mail and the photos you sent so intriguing that I will b e off to Angkor Wat soon to look at the sight. Thanks for your inspiration, —HS
Harold Stephens
Bangkok
E-mail: ROH Weekly Travel (booking@inet.co.th)
Note: The article is the personal view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited. | 
