Ĭlovis people are generally accepted to have hunted mammoths, as well as extinct bison, mastodon, gomphotheres, sloths, tapir, camelops, horse, and other smaller animals. Clovis sites have since been identified throughout much of the contiguous United States, as well as Mexico and Central America, and even into northern South America. The in situ finds of 19 included most of four stone Clovis points, two long bone points with impact damage, stone blades, a portion of a Clovis blade core, and several cutting tools made on stone flakes. These finds were deemed especially important due to their direct association with mammoth species and the extinct Bison antiquus.
1, an archaeological site between the towns of Clovis and Portales, New Mexico. The culture is named after artifacts found between 19 at Blackwater Locality No. Archaeologists do not agree on whether the widespread presence of these artifacts indicates the proliferation of a single people, or the adoption of a superior technology by diverse population groups. Clovis tools were produced during a roughly 300 year period. The Clovis point is bifacial and typically fluted on both sides. Ĭlovis points from the Rummells-Maske Cache Site, IowaĪ hallmark of the toolkit associated with the Clovis culture is the distinctively shaped, fluted-stone spear point, known as the Clovis point. The oldest claimed human archaeological site in the Americas is the Pedra Furada hearths in Brazil, controversially dated to 19,000 to 30,000 years before the earliest Clovis sites. However, several archaeological discoveries have cast significant doubt on the Clovis-first theory, including sites such as Cactus Hill in Virginia, Paisley Caves in the Summer Lake Basin of Oregon, the Topper site in Allendale County South Carolina, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, the Friedkin site in Texas, Cueva Fell in Chile, and especially Monte Verde also in Chile. Although this is generally held to be the result of normal cultural change through time, numerous other reasons have been suggested as driving forces to explain changes in the archaeological record, such as the Younger Dryas postglacial climate change, which exhibited numerous faunal extinctions.Īfter the discovery of several Clovis sites in eastern North America in the 1930s, the Clovis people came to be regarded as the first human inhabitants who created a widespread culture in the Americas. Each of these is thought to derive directly from Clovis, in some cases apparently differing only in the length of the fluting on their projectile points. Post-Clovis cultures include the Folsom tradition, Gainey, Suwannee-Simpson, Plainview- Goshen, Cumberland, and Redstone. The Clovis culture was replaced by several more localized regional societies from the Younger Dryas cold-climate period onward. Paleogenetic analyses of Anzick-1's ancient nuclear, mitochondrial, and Y-chromosome DNA reveal that Anzick-1 is closely related to modern Native American populations, which lends support to the Beringia hypothesis for the settlement of the Americas. The only human burial that has been directly associated with tools from the Clovis culture included the remains of an infant boy researchers named Anzick-1.
Clovis people are considered to be the ancestors of most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Archaeologists' most precise determinations at present suggest this radiocarbon age is equal to roughly 13,200 to 12,900 calendar years ago. It appears around 11,500–11,000 uncalibrated RCYBP at the end of the last glacial period and is characterized by the manufacture of " Clovis points" and distinctive bone and ivory tools. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s. The Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleoamerican culture, named for distinct stone tools found in close association with Pleistocene fauna at Blackwater Locality No. A Clovis projectile point created using bifacial percussion flaking (that is, each face is flaked on both edges alternately with a percussor)