The region of New York served by WSKG Public Television and Radio is considered by many (and not just those who live here) to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. The Catskills and Finger Lakes , the Susquehanna  and Delaware River Valleys are filled with breathtaking and peaceful vistas. Towns and villages in these hills and along the rivers and streams often blend into the natural setting. Most farmland is a gentle and respectful use of the terrain. It is possible to feel as if this has all been here forever.

Many of our programs have recounted the history of communities that WSKG covers, telling about the people and events that shape our times. Now we examine the land itself, why it looks the way it is and how it has changed over millions of years. It is a story of ancient and existing natural forces and of how people made their first impression on a place we may find familiar.

A natural history of New York’s Southern Tier is not simply the story of one place. Everything on earth is connected in many ways. But some of the phenomena at work in our part of the world were extraordinary, and the variety and accessibility of geological forms has made this region a center for study of the earth sciences.

Solid land is not as solid as it may seem. The continents have been shifting for billions of years and this tectonic shift  – a collision and separation of land masses – pushed the mountains and hills into place. What is now upstate New York once had a tropical climate. Six hundred million years ago the entire Southern Tier was beneath a wide, shallow ocean filled with marine life.

We can observe a bit of the geologic time scale  just by looking around, as our expert guides will show us on Our Rocks and Rolling Hills. There are also abundant traces of life that flourished and faded over millions of years. According to Dr. Warren Allmon , director of the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI)  in Ithaca, "Central New York is one of the best places to study paleontology… It’s very difficult not to find a fossil in central New York."

Dr. Robert Titus, chair of the department of geology at Hartwick College  shows us some of the natural wonders that surround Hartwick’s Oneonta campus. Finding shellfish fossils at an elevation of 1000 feet above sea level is "one of the great discoveries of geology." And at Taughannock Falls near Ithaca, PRI education director Dr. Robert Ross  says that if you look down the gorge "you can actually look back in history". A good part of the rock formation dates from the Devonian Period about 380 million years ago. At that time the 30,000-foot Acadian Mountains  dominated the landscape of what would become New York.

We can see the result of both plate tectonics and the Devonian Period at Enfield Glen  in Robert H. Treman State Park south of Ithaca. Dr. Arthur Bloom , a geomorphologist and professor emeritus in Cornell’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science, shows how the joints in the rock conform to a pattern that sets them exactly 20 west of north, the result of "Morocco colliding with North America."

There are also remnants of animal and vegetable life from past ages in the fossils  that have been deposited by the billions in some spots. Rob Ross shows us how to dig them up and introduces us to brachiopods and trilobites from the PRI’s world-famous collection. Fossilized creatures have also been found at the studio of artist Barbara Page, who has painted over 500 panels that start with algae 543 million years ago. This series of paintings will eventually be housed in the PRI’s Museum of the Earth, now under construction, and can already be seen in the book "Rock of Ages Sands of Time" with text by Warren Allmon.

One of the most signficiant events of the past 200 million years was the Ice Age  – actually a series of advances and retreats of ice sheets. Some glacial episodes reached into this part of New York and, as Dr. Bob Titus explains, a glacier "is really a conveyor belt" dumping gravel, sand and other material as it melts. These glacial moraines are among the most common and most attractive characteristics of our local topography.

The prehistory of the Southern Tier includes prehistoric animals. No dinosaurs have been found in our local area, but this seems to have been home to a large number of mammoths and mastodons. The 12,000 year-old bones of these ancestors of the elephant have recently turned up beneath the ground at Hyde Park  in the Hudson Valley, North Java , at the western end of the state and at Pine Valley, in the Southern Tier near the Schuyler/Chemung County line. They attracted the interest of The Mastodon Project , a consortium of PRI and Cornell University. Under the direction of Cornell vertebrate paleontologist Dr. John Chiment  teams of students and professionals began work at Pine Valley on what is known as Cornell’s Gilbert Mastodon . They soon realized that they were uncovering the bones of two animals, the first time in North America that specimens of a mastodon and a mammoth had been found in the same place. (Whether they "knew each other" hasn’t been determined).

The habits of Cornell’s Gilbert Mastodon and the environment during its lifetime are being studied at the PRI, and with the cooperation of thousands of schoolchildren. The mud in which the bones were buried – paleontologists call it "matrix" – is being analyzed from five-pound samples sent to schools around the world.

Our Rocks & Rolling Hills is sure to make many viewers suspect that there may be a mastodon or other prehistoric creature in under their pond or patio. The professionals advise that although the Southern Tier was a natural environment for mastodon to spend its last days and ground-penetrating radar can now give a property owner a quick view into what may be beneath a lawn or lake, there is also a cost consideration. Parts of mastodons are commonly offered on popular auction websites, but it may cost about $50,000 to excavate the remains of a such an animal. Then (if it is reasonably complete) it may only bring about $50,000 from a museum, university or private collector.

One of the most recent developments in the natural history of the Southern Tier is the arrival of humans about 12-14,000 years ago, during what is referred to as the Archaic Period . The science of archeology  seeks out and analyzes traces of human activity and the Public Archeology Facility at Binghamton University explores sites of importance in this region. In the field with team leader Tim Knapp  and his crew at Hale Eddy, near the Delaware River, we see how archeologists must work carefully and not be discouraged. A day’s work might only yield a tiny spear point or pottery shard – or nothing at all.

According to Dr. Nina Versaggi , director of the PAF, "the hunters and gatherers who were at the time, 5 or 6,000 BC and even afterwards, they had a much better knowledge of their region than we do today. They had to live and survive on scarce resources."

But archeologists still aren’t positive of the identity of the paleo-Indians, the first human visitors to what is today the Southern Tier, or their relationship to Native Americans of our time. However, with the stabilization of our climate after the melting of the glaciers and the beginnings of agriculture and permanent settlement, the region came to resemble what we see today from our windows and on Our Rocks and Rolling Hills.

Our Rocks And Rolling Hills, an original WSKG-TV documentary, was produced by WSKG's Bill Jaker.

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