By Jim Knippenberg
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Most people can't picture it, but Ken Tankersley can: Great rolling fields, often shrouded in mists. Murky bogs waiting to suck in the unwary, like the giant mammoth and her calf squirming to get out. Hungry hunters digging razor sharp points into the mammoth's side, waiting for her to fall when they'll eat her liver ... raw, still dripping warm blood.

Ken Tankersley holds a cast of molars from a mastadon from 18,000 B.C. that was used as a prop for a movie filmed in Big Bone Lick Park. (Tony Jones photo) | ZOOM |

Welcome to the Ice Age in Northern Kentucky, specifically at Big Bone Lick. Ken Tankersley wasn't there at the time, but he knows what happened.

Mr. Tankersley, 47, is a soft-spoken anthropologist with one foot planted in the high-tech world of modern TV and the other planted in a 12,000-year-old Ice Age bog.

He's also an author: His In Search of Ice Age Americans (Gibbs Smith; $24.95) has been around a little more than a month but has already been the basis of three television documentaries.

The native Cincinnatian recently moved to Highland Heights with his wife, Jenny, after getting his PhD at Indiana University and teaching at State University of New York. Besides author and scholar, he's also a consultant for the Discovery Channel and for the Natural History Unit of the BBC.

"Jenny wanted to come home,'' is how he explains the move. "I had just been offered a job in Colorado, a university chair backed by a $1 million endowment, but we came home instead. And that's OK, because Cincinnati has a rich Ice Age history. Most people don't know, but this is where the ice (glacier) stopped. And Big Bone Lick, it's just one of the most important sites anywhere."

Then there is the Cincinnati Museum Center's Ice Age exhibit, which he says is "the best in the country."

There's no doubt he believes that explicitly. The pronouncements come with a fire in his eye, a massive grin from one end of his moustache to the other, and a gesture so broad he has to put his fork back in his salad to avoid injuring someone.

Today Mr. Tankersley works at home, surrounded by stuff several millennia old (like an 18,000-year-old clump of woolly mammoth hair) continuing what began during a chat 15 years ago with Doug Preston, author of The Relic. "By then, I had written dozens of scholarly articles and Doug said, `Ken, take the best one you've written. How many people read it?' I told him about 500. He told me I should be talking to millions and doing it in plain English that a ninth-grader could understand.

"I took him seriously. Shortly after that I worked on a National Geographic special called Mysteries Underground. We shot 17 hours a day in the caves of New Mexico and Kentucky, and it was the hardest work I ever did. But it got me started."

Now, he's an old hand at it. The Discovery Channel's two-hour What Killed the Mega Beasts, based on what eventually became Chapter 13 of his book, premiered in August and continues in reruns. Most of it was filmed at the Museum Center at Union Terminal.

The BBC's The Monsters We Met, based on what became Chapter 1, is in post production and due to premiere in 2003. Still more local filming, this time at Big Bone.

Come April, a third film will shoot, this one based on his book's account of Captain Charles Lemoyne de Longueil's expedition to Big Bone in 1729.

"There's no question that Big Bone should be a World Heritage Site (sites so important to science they're considered a global treasure, such as Mammoth Cave and St. Louis' Cahokia, the U.S.' largest earthen mound) Discoveries there, particularly proof that man was here 25,000 years ago, revolutionized what we know about our world. In fact, the discoveries by Charles Lyell and others studying there in the 1700s revolutionized our understanding of our place in the universe.

"Few people realize it, but an expedition financed by Thomas Jefferson was the first to prove that the American Indian had been here since the Ice Age. The expedition bankrupted him so thoroughly that he had some of the bones they found ground up for fertilizer for his garden. Others he donated to museums.

"But what the discoveries proved was that man was here at the time of the great beasts and that he hunted them." And then ate them raw - not a pretty sight the way he describes it, but it's accurate, and that's something Mr. Tankersley insists upon. As author and consultant, he has to be on location for all shooting, sometimes shaking his head no.

"One of them had Ice Age people sitting around smoking pipes. That never happened because tobacco wasn't introduced until much later, so the scene was pulled. Another one had them chipping chunks of steel to start a fire. I told them it had to be two sticks.

"The thing with all these shows is that they're fiction, but they're fiction based on science. Real science."

Giving thumbs down to toking cavemen isn't the only thing Mr. Tankersley does on the set. He also helps with props, makes casts for mammoths, and even once designed the clothes worn by the cast in a documentary.

"I insist that they be as accurate as possible, right down to what they're wearing and how they eat."

Not to mention when exactly they lived and where they came from. He's certain the first Americans arrived 25,000 to 30,000 years ago, but their origins are a little hazier.

"There are three theories on where the first Americans came from. One is East Siberia and the old land bridge idea, though they wouldn't have needed one because the water's frozen over in winter anyway. Another has them following the Pacific Coast north. A third has them coming from Europe's Iberian Peninsula. Only a few people believe that.

"The answer isn't in stones, bones and pots. You'll find the answer in the language and the blood of the American Indian. We can now look at DNA and factor in mutation rates to calculate genetic distance.

"When you do this, it suggests that they came from various locations and eventually grew into the American Indians. That also fits the linguistic evidence. There is such a vast diversity of language among American Indians, some as different as English and Russian. That suggests they came from many lands.

"What I find fascinating, and what people don't realize, is that except for technology, humans are unchanged since the Ice Age. If you could bring someone back, I'm certain he could adapt and learn."

And when he did come back, Mr. Tankersley would have questions: "I'd want to know things I could never know from the fossil record - their language, their ideology, belief systems - the parts of culture that don't preserve.

"That's why I'd go straight to the Ice Age if someone ever invented time travel."