*The La Brea Tar Pits are not big simmering
pools of pure pitch. Basically they are oozy
little tongues of tar that seep out onto the
surface and then pile up and harden over millennia.
*It doesn't take much tar to kill a large animal.
Basically, thirsty beasts would wade in, get stuck
flypaper style, start bleating in dismay, and
then gangs of local carnivores would rush over
to rend them, and the entire rugby scrim would
get stuck and die in the sun.
*In La Brea, carnivores and scavengers
outnumber the herbivores about four to one.
*In particular, there are thousands and thousands
of wolves. The pits must have eaten up wolves
by the snack-pack.
*The Disneyesque bellowing mastodon infant here
is a nice touch, very Southern California and
cinematic, somehow. "Mom! Mom! Come
out of the tar, Mom!" Spielberg can still reel 'em
in with sentiment like this.
*Volunteers are whisking and icepicking their
way through the semisolid viscous ooze here. There is
a lot of historical DNA in those pits. It wouldn't
surprise me much if, a century from now,
most of the long-extinct tarpit victims are back
on their clawed Pleistocene feet and running around in public.
*This is the only human inhabitant of the pit,
the oldest known Angeleno, "LaBrea Woman."
You'd think that a curvaceous SoCal beach babe
like this would have been given a sexier
nickname.
*La Brea Woman didn't meet an attractive end.
At the age of maybe 20, she was apparently sashaying
down Wilshire Boulevard nine thousand years ago,
when some unknown party knocked her
skull in with her own grinding-stone and also killed her little dog.
Most of her body is missing. I'd be guessing those
were the juicier and more tender parts of her body.
*The rest of her ended up in the tar. One senses
a certain deliberate malice here. It's awe-inspiring
to see that much raw menace out of petroleum.
Especially when you realize that petroleum is
already a necrotic substance made out of the
congealed dead.
