While most of you zip down Congress or Fourth Streets, you probably never think about what Troy looked like thousands of years ago - but I do! If you enjoyed the frigid temperatures of last week, you would have loved Troy during the Pleistocene Era that ended here around 10,000 years.

Most of the Hudson Valley was covered by glacial ice and then postglacial Lake Albany. The lake covered Rensselaer County up to about 450 feet above sea level at maximum. If you had lived up on East Side, you had beachfront property; in downtown, you would have been swimming.

It might be hard to imagine that there were prehistoric mastodons (ice age elephant-like animals) walking down the area of Third Street only 8,000 years ago. There also may have been big blocks of detached ice from the last ice sheet (glacier) sitting in several areas of Rensselaer County.

Two types of ancient elephant-like animals roamed North America. The mammoths were represented by three species (genus Mammuthus): the Columbian mammoth (M. columbi), Jefferson's mammoth (M. jeffersonii), and the woolly mammoth (M. primigenius); and the mastodont (Mammut americanum) that were the size of a modern Indian elephant. It became extinct about 8000 years ago. Or to put it another way, humans were just getting the hang of farming (agriculture) for the first time!

Early Native American residents hunted both mammoths and mastodonts for food, and artifacts have been found with their bones. A special kind of fluted projectile point is attributed to humans that are found with mastodont remains. A total of 297 fluted points have been found in New York State. In the counties on the western side of the Hudson River: Saratoga, Albany, and Green, a total of 53 fluted points have been found. In contrast, on the eastern side of the Hudson in counties Washington, Rensselaer, and Columbia, no fluted points have been found. This may support the theory that our side of the river was still under ice or blocked for human occupation this early on.

In Cohoes, a mastodont was uncovered in 1866 when they were digging for the construction of one of the textile mills near the Cohoes Falls. This 'elephant' has been radiocarbon dated to have lived there 11,070 years ago. The Cohoes mastodont was first exhibited in Troy at Harmony Hall and the County fair while still a pile of bones. It has since been reconstructed (a second time) and is now on exhibition at the State Museum in Albany. The City of Cohoes library has on exhibit an early reconstruction made from the early days of the state museum.

During the summer of 2000, the Paleontological Research Institution began excavation of a newly discovered mastodont in Hyde Park just south of us and that was dated at 9600 years before the present. There have been more than 100 mastodonts and mammoths recovered in the State, more than half from the Hudson Valley (mostly in Orange County).

The first mastodont uncovered in New York State occurred in 1705 when a Dutchman found a tooth and bones in Claverack. More than 200 years ago, in 1801, on John Masten's farm near Newburgh in Orange County, Charles Willson Peale, the famous painter and founder of the Philadelphia Museum completed the excavation of "Incognitum," as it was called, a mostly complete mastodont skeleton that ended up on exhibition on December 24, 1801 in Philadelphia, and created a national stir.

The bottom line is try to realize that your life, like the mastodons before you, can become simply a foot note in time, or the subject of a columnist's thought process. My guess is that two hundred years from now, some writer from the Trojan Enterprise (the successor to the Record) will be lamenting about how silly we were for knocking so many buildings down so cars could take up their space for eight useless hours. Of course, this will be at a time when each Trojan is flying around with a personal body jet for mobility that is hung next to the coat rack at the office, alleviating any need for parking lots or garages - or perhaps even cars.

As Beatle George Harrison once sang, "All things must pass." That includes mastodonts and hopefully stupid planning decisions.