Kentucky’s Big Bone Lick State Park is now Big Bone Lick National Historic Landmark

The Pleistocene Epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until it ended roughly 11,000 years ago. It’s an era of Earth’s history that, more or less, has been co-opted into the Ice Age.

It was an age that saw humans first emerge on the planet, but also one that saw the extinction of hundreds of other mammals in the process as Earth’s climate evolved. North America alone saw extinctions of multiple ancient species of bison, the loss of some half-dozen species of muskox, the stag-moose, and the good ol’ wooly mammoth.

We know this because we’ve found their bones, and because well-qualified experts have been able to study said bones well enough to date them.

Located on the banks of Big Bone Creek some 25 miles south of Cincinnati, Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky sits in between the divinely named settlements of Beaverlick and Rabbit Hash, just east of the confluence of Big South Fork and the Ohio River. The area historically featured a salt lick that attracted, over time, the likes of mammoth as well as mastodon, bison, saber-toothed cats, peccary, bears, elk, caribou, and many more, the marshy area surrounding the lick a natural spot to end up housing bones of all over time

The area became a gold mine for paleontology research after fossils began being discovered in the area as early as the mid 1700s. By 1950, the Boone County (KY) Historical Society sought to protect the area as a Kentucky State Park, and it has since grown into a 525 acre protected area – as well as a National Natural Landmark and Lewis and Clark Heritage Trail site.

As of December 16th, 2024, Big Bone Lick is now officially a National Historic Landmark (NHL), too.

The site was chosen as one of 19 by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, officially gaining the same federally protected status as that of Colorado’s Pikes Peak, the Berkeley plantation in Virginia of the Harrison family that produced two Presidents, Kentucky’s Churchill Downs, and Yale University’s Connecticut Hall, among many others.

The 19 NHLs designated by Secretary Haaland today placed emphasis on those of LGBTQ, African American, Asian American, and Pacific Islander history, as well as that of women’s history within our country, as the National Park Service’s press release indicated, as well as “moments important in development of American technology, landscape design, and art.”