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The Clovis culture (less frequently referred to as the Llano culture in the Plains and Southwest today) is a prehistoric Paleoindian culture that first appears in the archaeological record of North America around 11,500 rcbp radiocarbon years ago, at the end of the last ice age. Archaeologists\' best guess at present suggests this is equal to roughly 13,000 calendar years ago. The Clovis culture is thought to have lasted from between 200 and 800 years, depending on the source consulted, with an average estimate of around 500 years, starting about 13,000 years ago.
The culture is named for a small number of artifacts found in situ at Blackwater Draw Locality #1, near Clovis, New Mexico in 1936 and 1937. People began collecting artifacts at this site in the late 1920s but artifacts and animal remains that had not moved since the Pleistocene were not recovered until 1936. The in situ finds of 1936 and 1937 included stone Clovis points, two long bone points with impact damage that led to their incorrect identification as foreshafts, stone blades, a portion of a Clovis blade core, and several cutting tools made on stone flakes. Clovis sites have since been identified throughout much, but not all, of the contiguous United States, as well as Mexico and Central America, and even into Northern South America (see Pearson and Ream in Current Research in the Pleistocene 2005, Volume 22).
The Clovis people, one of several Paleoindian groups, were long regarded as the first human inhabitants of the New World, and ancestors of all the indigenous cultures of North and South America. However, this view has been contested over the last thirty years by several archaeological discoveries, including sites like Cactus Hill, Virginia, Paisley Cave, Nevada, Meadowcroft Rockshelter, and Monte Verde, Chile.
The Clovis culture seems to have ended at the time of the Younger Dryas cold climate period, hypothesized to be a result of the Younger Dryas impact event.
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A hallmark of the toolkit associated with the Clovis culture is the distinctively-shaped fluted rock spear point, known as the Clovis point. The Clovis point is bifacial and typically fluted on both sides. 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. It is generally accepted that Clovis people hunted mammoth as Clovis points have repeatedly been found in sites containing mammoth remains. Mammoth is only a small part of the Clovis diet; extinct bison, mastodon, sloths, tapir, palaeolama, horse and a host of smaller animals have also been found in Clovis sites where they were killed and eaten. In total, more than 125 species of plants and animals are known to have been used by Clovis people in the portion of the Western Hemisphere they inhabited. Clovis sites are known from most of North America, some parts of Central America, and even into northern South America in Venezuela (see Pearson and Ream 2005).
Whether the Clovis culture drove the mammoth, and other species, to extinction via overhunting -- the so-called Pleistocene overkill hypothesis -- is still an open, and controversial, question. The greater likelihood is that a combination of climate change, human predation, disease, and additional pressures from newly arrived herbivores (competition) and carnivores (predation) and isolation made it impossible for them to reproduce and survive. It has also been hypothesized that the Clovis culture saw its demise in the wake of the Younger Dryas cold phase. This \'cold shock\' lasting roughly 1,500 years affected many parts of the world, including North America. It appears to have been triggered by a vast meltwater lake - Lake Agassiz - emptying into the North Atlantic, disrupting the thermohaline circulation. Some have suggested the Younger Dryas began when an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth\'s atmosphere above North America\'s Great Lakes region about 12,900 years ago, although this is not a mainstream scientific view. An apparent association of the last Clovis artifacts and an organic stratigraphic layer laid down during the Younger Dryas has been noted:
At sites stretching from California to the Carolinas and as far north as Alberta and Saskatchewan, researchers have long noted an enigmatic layer of carbon-rich sediment that was laid down nearly 13 millennia ago. "Clovis artifacts are never found above this black mat," says Allen West, a geophysicist with Geoscience Consulting in Dewey, Ariz. The layer, typically a few millimeters thick, lies between older, underlying strata that are chock-full of mammoth bones and younger, fossilfree sediments immediately above, he notes.Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada?: Science News Online, June 2, 2007It is important to note that the distribution of the black mat layer is not uniform across North America at the end of Clovis time.
A cowboy and former slave, George McJunkin, found an Ancient Bison (an extinct relative of the American Bison) skeleton with an associated Folsom point in about 1908 after a massive flood. It was first excavated in 1926, near Folsom, New Mexico under the direction of Harold Cook and Jesse Figgins. In 1929, 19-year-old James Ridgley Whiteman, discovered the Clovis Man Site in the Blackwater Draw in Eastern New Mexico. Despite earlier legitimate Paleoindian discoveries, the best understood evidence of the Clovis tool complex was excavated in 1932-1937 in Clovis, New Mexico, by a crew under the direction of Edgar Billings Howard from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences/University of Pennsylvania. Howard\'s crew left their excavation in Burnet Cave, New Mexico (truly the first professionally excavated Clovis site) in August and visited Whiteman and his Blackwater Draw site. In November, Howard was back at Blackwater Draw to investigate additional finds by Whiteman.
There may be earlier reports of the Paleoindian layers of the dig in Burnet Cave, but it seems likely that the first report of professional work at a Clovis site concerns the Blackwater Draw site in the November 25, 1932 issue of Science. This directly contradicts statements by some authors (Haynes 2002:56 The Early Settlement of North America) that Dent, Colorado was the first excavated Clovis site. The Dent Site, in Weld County, Colorado, was simply a fossil mammoth excavation in 1932. The first Dent Clovis point was found July 7, 1933. The in situ Clovis point from Burnet Cave was excavated in late August, 1931 and E. B. Howard brought it to the 3rd Pecos Conference and showed it around (see Woodbury 1983).
Until recently, the standard theory (known as Clovis First) among archaeologists was that the Clovis people were the first inhabitants of the Americas. The primary support of the theory was that no solid evidence of pre-Clovis human inhabitation had been found. According to the standard accepted theory, the Clovis people crossed the Beringia land bridge over the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska during the period of lowered sea levels during the ice age, then made their way southward through an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains in present-day western Canada as the glaciers retreated.
Wider analysis, however, indicates that predecessors of the Clovis people may have migrated south along the North American coastline. According to researchers Michael Waters and Thomas Stafford of Texas A&M University, new radiocarbon dates places Mid-west Clovis remains in a shorter time window (13,050 to 12,800 years ago)A&M University Press Article, while radiocarbon dating of the Monte Verde site in Chile place Clovis like culture there as early as 13,500 years ago and remains found at the California Channel Islands place coastal Paleoindians there 12,500 years ago. This suggests that the Paleoindian migration could have spread more quickly along the coastline south, and that populations that settled along that route could have then began migrations Eastward into the continent.
Archaeologists have long debated the possible existence of a culture older than Clovis in North and South America. Several potential pre-Clovis sites have emerged:
Recent studies of the mitochondrial DNA of First Nations/Native Americans suggest that the people of the New World may have diverged genetically from Siberians as early as 20,000 years ago, far earlier than the standard theory would suggest. According to one alternative theory, the Pacific coast of North America may have been free of ice such as to allow the first peoples in North America to come down this route prior to the formation of the ice-free corridor in the continental interior. No solid evidence has yet been found to support this hypothesis except that genetic analysis of coastal marine life indicates diverse fauna persisting in refugia throughout the Pleistocene ice ages along the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia; these refugia include common food sources of coastal aboriginal peoples, suggesting that a migration along the coastline was feasible at the time.
The controversial Solutrean hypothesis proposed in 1999 by Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford and colleague Bruce Bradley (Stanford and Bradley 2002), suggests that the Clovis people could have inherited technology from the Solutrean people who lived in southern Europe 21,000-15,000 years ago, and who created the first Stone Age artwork in present-day southern France. The link is suggested by the similarity in technology between the projectile points of the Solutreans and those of the Clovis people. Such a theory would require that the Solutreans crossed via the edge of the pack ice in the North Atlantic Ocean that then extended to the Atlantic coast of France. They could have done this using survival skills similar to those of the modern Inuit people. Supporters of this hypothesis suggest that stone tools found at Cactus Hill (an early American site in Virginia), that are knapped in a style between Clovis and Solutrean. Other scholars such as Emerson F. Greenman and Remy Cottevieille-Giraudet have also suggested a Northern Atlantic point of entry, citing toolmaking similarities between Clovis and Solutrean-era artifacts.
Mitochondrial DNA analysis (see Map in Single-origin hypothesis) has found that some members of some native North American tribes have a maternal ancestry (called haplogroup X) (Schurr 2000) linked to the maternal ancestors of some present day individuals in western Asia and Europe, albeit distantly.
University of New Mexico anthropologist Lawrence G. Straus, a primary critic of the Solutrean hypothesis, points to the theoretical difficulty of the ocean crossing, a lack of Solutrean-specific features in pre-Clovis artifacts, as well as the lack of art (such as that found at Lascaux in France) among the Clovis people, as major deficiencies in the Solutrean hypothesis. The 3,000 to 5,000 radiocarbon year gap between the Solutrean period of France and Spain and the Clovis of the New World also makes such a connection problematic (Straus 2000). In response, defenders of the hypothesis state that the Solutreans introduced a tool-making innovation and not necessarily cultural or artistic practices.
An article in the American Journal of Human Genetics states "Here we show, by using 86 complete mitochondrial genomes, that all Native American haplogroups, including haplogroup X, were part of a single founding population, thereby refuting multiple-migration models."http://www.ajhg.org/AJHG/fulltext/S0002-9297(08)00139-0# "Mitochondrial Population Genomics Supports a Single Pre-Clovis Origin with a Coastal Route for the Peopling of the Americas" Fagundes, Nelson J.R.; Kanitz, Ricardo; Eckert, Roberta; Valls, Ana C.S.; Bogo, Mauricio R.; Salzano, Francisco M.; Smith, David Glenn; Silva, Wilson A.; Zago, Marco A.; Ribeiro-dos-Santos, Andrea K.; Santos, Sidney E.B.; Petzl-Erler, Maria Luiza; Bonatto, Sandro L. American journal of human genetics(volume 82 issue 3 pp.583 - 592)
Pearson, Georges and Joshua Ream, Clovis on the Caribbean Coast of Venezuela. Current Research in the Pleistocene, Volume 22:28-31 2005 (issn 8755-898X).
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