La Brea Tar Pits: The Ice Age Under the Miracle Mile

The asphalt is still seeping. On warm days you can smell it near the observation pit at the edge of the park, a faint petroleum smell in the middle of the Miracle Mile. The tar pits have been seeping for at least forty thousand years.

The Spanish Portolá expedition described the tar marshes here in seventeen sixty-nine, noting the area smelled of sulfur. The Tongva people, who had lived in the basin for at least three thousand years before the Spanish arrived, knew the tar seeps as a source of waterproofing material.

In nineteen twenty-four, George Allan Hancock donated the site to Los Angeles County. The excavations that followed have recovered the most extensive cache of Ice Age fossils from any urban location in the world. More than three million individual specimens: dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, American mastodons, ground sloths, American lions, short-faced bears, horses, camels. The tar preserved them by drawing them in and holding them.

Among the recovered specimens is a human: a young Tongva woman, estimated to have been between eighteen and twenty-four years old at the time of her death, dating to approximately nine thousand years before present. She is the only Pleistocene-era human found at the site. Her descendants built Mission San Gabriel. The Page Museum, which opened in nineteen seventy-seven, displays the excavation. Outside, the tar is still seeping.