NEWS&ANALYSIS

ARCHAEOLOGY Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunters Make a Point

The experienced hunter hurled or thrust his animals in Beringia, the land now partly of Clovis-fi rst advocates remain skeptical. spear at the left side of the 3-ton adult male submerged in the region around the Bering They say that so far all the evidence, includ- mastodon. The bone point passed through Strait. The first Americans likely migrated ing that from Manis, has problems. “There 25 to 30 centimeters of hide and muscle, from Beringia as the last ice age gave way to may have been a period of ‘pre-Clovis’ then pierced a rib bone. That wound alone warmer temperatures and glaciers retreated. human presence in North America, but I likely did not kill the massive animal, but For many archaeologists, the debate over wish I could see a solid demonstration of under the onslaught of a group of hunters, whether pre-Clovis peoples roamed the that presence somewhere that doesn’t have the mastodon eventually fell on its left side. Americas is over. “Manis is another pre- or nagging problems,” says archaeologist Gary The victorious hunters then retrieved most non-Clovis site on the map,” says anthropol- Haynes of the University of Nevada, Reno. of their weapons and butchered the animal’s ogist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University He questions whether the bone point was right side. But the valuable spear point in Nashville, who announced his really a human-shaped weapon, saying that remained inaccessible, buried under own pre-Clovis site in Chile it might have been a piece of bone acci- the giant carcass. back in 1997. dentally driven into the rib. Archaeologist That ancient hunter’s loss is a Megafauna like the mast- Stuart Fiedel of the Louis Berger Group Inc. gain for researchers on a different odon and its relative the mam- in Richmond, Virginia, praises the team’s kind of hunt: the search for clues moth disappeared quickly after sophisticated techniques but questions the to the peopling of the Americas. the arrival of Clovis points dating. He notes that the mastodon’s envi- Back in the 1970s, archaeologists 13,000 years ago, prompting ronment had sources of “old” carbon, found the mastodon’s remains, some scientists to speak of a including the ocean and geothermal pools, complete with rib bone and embed- that could give a falsely ancient date ded point, at the Manis Mastodon site if the mastodon ingested food or on March 12, 2012 on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, water from those sources. Waters near the Juan de Fuca Strait. Now on calls this a “red herring,” however, page 351 of this issue, researchers led because the surrounding sediment by Michael Waters of Texas A&M Uni- age closely matches the bone dating. versity in College Station use DNA Haynes adds that the oldest Clovis and radiocarbon dating to demonstrate sites are “only” 8 centuries younger that the point came from a mastodon than Manis. Thus the rib “may actu- bone shaped into a weapon by humans ally indicate the earliest beginning www.sciencemag.org and used a startling 13,800 years ago. of the Clovis era, or an immediately That’s nearly 1000 years before the proto-Clovis stage of human disper- Clovis culture, known for its distinctive sal,” he says. “Proto-Clovis” peoples stone spear points and long considered in small numbers may have fi ltered to be the fi rst culture in the New World. south from Beringia as early as The fi nd adds to the wave of recent com- 14,000 years ago, he says, although pelling evidence demonstrating an earlier, their impact was negligible until pre-Clovis settling of the Americas (Science, the arrival of Clovis technology. To Downloaded from 25 March, p. 1512). Although a few Clovis- Waters, such talk of “proto-Clovis” fi rst holdouts remain unconvinced, the early amounts to “grasping at straws.” bone point also suggests that the extinction Sandweiss says the implications of large mammals such as mastodons and Big game. Archaeologists say that pre-Clovis hunters in of the paper in fact go beyond the mammoths may have begun long before the Washington state used a bone spear point (seen above Clovis–pre-Clovis wrangling. Many Clovis people came on the scene. “This is embedded in a rib) to pierce a mastodon. scientists argue that pre-Clovis peo- signifi cant because we have so few widely ple moved south along the Pacific accepted pre-Clovis sites,” says anthropolo- “blitzkrieg”: a rapid hunting of these giant Coast, possibly by boat (Science, 4 March, gist Daniel Sandweiss of the University of animals to extinction. But combined with p. 1122). In his view, the location of Manis Maine, Orono. The solid dating combined evidence of pre-Clovis mammoth hunting near the ocean is an intriguing hint favor- with the strong evidence for pre-Clovis hunt- at two other North American sites, Waters ing this idea. “The Manis site supports early ing on a site near the coast make the results argues that human hunters were already at occupation of the coastal zone,” he says. particularly important, he adds. work on killing megafauna before the debut Waters, who has reported pre-Clovis inte- Waters’s team subjected the rib and bone of Clovis-style weapons. Other researchers rior sites as well, is cautious. “We can’t say barb to a battery of tests, from DNA sequenc- agree: “The notion of the blitzkrieg move- these were coastal folks,” he says of the ing and protein analyses to radiocarbon dating ment died with the Clovis-fi rst paradigm,” Manis hunters. But the paper’s findings, and a CT scan. They determined that the barb Dillehay asserts. Sandweiss says, “point to a more wide- comes from another mastodon and appears to Although a well-dated point embedded in spread and complex early settlement system resemble the sharpened bone points used to a mastodon rib seems like a smoking gun— than some might have suspected.” –ANDREW LAWLER kill mammoths, mastodons, and other large or spear—for the pre-Clovis case, a handful CREDITS: CENTER FORTHE STUDYTHE OF FIRST AMERICANS,TEXAS A&MUNIVERSITY

302 21 OCTOBER 2011 VOL 334 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Published by AAAS