People most likely made the points this way so they could easily affix them to a spear shaft.īased on sites excavated in the western United States, archaeologists know Paleo-American Clovis hunter-gatherers who lived around the time of the extinctions at least occasionally killed or scavenged Ice Age megafauna such as mammoths. These include iconic Clovis spearpoints with their distinctive flutes-concave areas left behind by removed stone flakes that extend from the base to the middle of the point. Our study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.Īrchaeologists have uncovered a sparse scattering of stone tools left at the campsites of Paleo-American Clovis hunter-gatherers who lived around the time of the megafauna extinctions. Just how implicated should humans be in the extinction of these ice-age animals? In a new study, my colleagues and I used a forensic technique more commonly used to identify blood on objects at crime scenes to investigate this question. One of my major interests as an archaeologist has been to understand how the earliest Paleo-Americans lived and interacted with megafauna species. Maybe it was overhunting on the part of humans, or some combination of all these factors. Others posit a catastrophic impact of a fragmented comet. Some suggest environmental changes happened faster than the animals could adapt to them. Scientists have pointed to various potential causes for the extinctions. Mammoths, mastodons, huge bison, horses, camels, very large ground sloths and giant short-faced bears all died out as the huge continental ice sheets disappeared at the end of the Ice Age. They've all been extinct for about 12,800 years. Obviously, you can't see any of these ice-age megafauna now.
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