Spearhead of the Clovis culture, approx. 11,000 BC Discovered in the state of Arizona. The material is flint. Length 2.98 x 8.5 x 0.7 cm (British Museum, London)
Today it is considered a proven fact that several millennia ago there was a strong cooling on the Earth, which led to glaciation, especially strong in the Northern Hemisphere. Huge masses of ice covered the northern part of Europe and … huge masses of water turned into this ice. As a result, the World Ocean "became shallower", and its level dropped by an average of 120 m. This is a lot, but where the water is now splashing, there was dry land at that time. An isthmus arose between Chukotka and Alaska, which received the name Beringia, and along it, its first inhabitants moved from Asia to America. That is, there was a gap in the glaciers, along which they went to the tundra areas, directly adjacent to the ice, and there they found themselves the "promised land" - a mass of wild, unafraid, animals in the complete absence of other people.
A lot of food - a high birth rate (although this is typical only for underdeveloped tribes). Therefore, people became more and more, and they went further and further. Until they settled on both continents.
But the very first culture in North America, the Stone Age culture of the first Americans, was the so-called Clovis culture - what archaeologists call the oldest and most widespread archaeological site in North America. It was named after the city in New Mexico, where the first finds belonging to this culture were discovered. Moreover, Clovis is known for his stunningly beautiful stone products, found not only throughout the United States, but also in northern Mexico and southern Canada. This technology for working with stone was also called "Clovis", and its artifacts began to be called "Clovis", so there is no need to be surprised at such a difference in terms.
True, today it is believed that Clovis technology was most likely not the first on the American continents. That there was a culture that should be called Pre-Clovis, whose representatives arrived in North America at least several thousand years before its emergence and are probably the ancestors of the future Clovis.
In different regions of the United States, the finds of the Clovis culture have different dates. There are figures of her age from 13 400 - 12 800 calendar years ago, while in the east from 12 800 - 12 500 years. The oldest artifact was found in Texas: 13,400 years ago. Well, on average, all this means that this means that the Clovis hunter culture lasted about 900 years on the American continent, after which other cultures began to replace it.
The points of the Clovis culture copies were lanceolate (leaf-shaped) in general outline, with parallel slightly convex sides and a concave rear part, and grooves for fastening in the shaft. This detail is their most distinctive feature, which makes it possible to distinguish this kind of product of this culture from any other. With the help of experimental archeology, it was proved that in order to make a clovis tip, an experienced craftsman needed a flint of a suitable shape and half an hour of time, but at the same time from 10-20% of them break when trying to make such grooves on them.
Archaeologists tried to fix such points in the shafts and made sure that they are tightly fixed in the clefts and if you also wrap them with a leather strap lubricated with bone glue, a very strong connection is obtained.
If anyone is interested in information about the Clovis culture in English, then this book contains a lot of interesting material. Just do not forget that although the word "point" is most often translated as "point", in this case it means exactly the tip!
Interestingly, a wide variety of minerals were used as material for clovis tips, not just flints. There are points made of obsidian and chalcedony, quartz and quartzite. It is interesting that the place where the tip was found is sometimes hundreds of kilometers from the place where such a mineral can be mined. Hence the conclusion - either the Clovis people roamed, or bargained between the tribes. That is, the stones transported over such long distances were clearly part of a large and expensive production process, which makes scientists believe that it almost certainly could not have done without a certain division of labor and building certain social communications.
Collection of spearheads of the Clovis culture. (Ohio State Archaeological Collection Office).
What has been shown by examining these tips under a microscope? The fact that many were really used as a spear point and, as such, even fell into the bones of animals, which caused them to have characteristic fractures and fractures. But some of them were used multifunctionally, for example, as knives.
Archaeologist W. Karl Hutchings (2015) conducted experiments and compared the nature of the fractures of the arrowheads of that time with those obtained in the course of modern throws at various targets. It turned out that at least some of them were thrown not with the hand, but with the atlatl's spear thrower.
For a long time it was believed that such a perfect hunting weapon made it possible for the Clovis people to hunt large animals so successfully that this led to their extinction. The bones of mammoths and many other large animals were found at the clovis sites, but still it is difficult to assume that only people exterminated them all.
The only known Clovis burial found to date is an uncovered infant skeleton covered in red ocher, combined with 100 stone tools and 15 bone tools. Radiocarbon analysis dates it from 12,707 to 12,556 years ago. This burial is evidence of ritual behavior, that is, people believed in the afterlife or the world of spirits even then. In addition, stones with carved images, pendants and beads of bone, stone, hematite and calcium carbonate were found. Engraved ivory, including carved ivory rods; the use of red ocher - all this also suggests the presence of a certain ceremony. There are now some undated rock carvings on Utah's Upper Sand Island depicting extinct fauna, including mammoths and bison, that may be associated with the Clovis culture.
The spearhead of the Clovis culture. (British Museum, London)
And here's what is interesting and to a certain extent strange: everything was fine with the Clovis, and suddenly they seemed to disappear somewhere. The animals they hunted died out at once and … for some reason this culture did not exist anymore. At many sites, traces of soot were found in the ground, that is, there were fires. It was concluded that a huge asteroid was to blame for this, which fell somewhere in Canada and caused fires throughout the continent. And above this "black rug", the Clovis culture is no longer observed stratigraphically. Then this hypothesis was abandoned, but now it is returned again, since in the bottom lacustrine relations of this time, a lot of platinum was found in microgranules. The question arises, where did it come from? Except as a giant asteroid, no one could bring it. It fell, exploded, dry grass flared up, if it happened in the summer; threw out a mass of soil, into which platinum also fell, into the sky, as a result of which a sharp cold snap set in, from which all the animals became extinct. And after them, people died out, and who did not die out went to other places and assimilated there.
Scientists managed to find out the genetic identity of the ancient Clovis people. So, in 2013, an international group of scientists read the genome of the only known representative of the Clovis culture - a two-year-old boy Anzik-1 (it was he who was found in a burial covered with yellow ocher), and who lived 12, 5 thousand years ago in the territory of the present state of Montana. It turned out that his Y-chromosome belongs to the Q-L54 haplogroup, and the mitochondrial chromosome belongs to the D4h3a haplogroup. The DNA was preserved extremely well, which made it possible to read the genome 14 times, which makes it possible to practically exclude an error. Comparison of the research results with modern data showed that the people of the Clovis culture were genetically related to the modern Indians of North and Central America and, accordingly, to the inhabitants of Asia.
And this book is of great interest. Everything is very detailed here: both photos of artifacts and graphic sketches. But … narrowly, only Wisconsin!
A year later, a group of scientists led by paleontologist James Chatters published the results of a study of the skeleton of a 15-year-old girl who supposedly lived 13 thousand years ago and was found in 2007 on the Yucatan Peninsula in the flooded Oyo Negro cave. Her mitochondrial DNA was obtained from her molars, and the results of her study showed that modern Indians belong to the same haplogroup D1, to which the ancient Clovis belonged, and today some modern peoples of Chukotka and Siberia belong.
