Clovis culture

The Clovis culture (also Llano culture) is a prehistoric Native American culture that first appears in the archaeological record of North America around 13,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.

The culture is named for artifacts found near Clovis, New Mexico, where the first accepted evidence of this tool complex was excavated in 1932 by a crew under the direction of Edgar Billings Howard from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences/University of Pennsylvania. Earlier evidence included a Bison antiquus, not mammoth, skeleton with a spear-point in its ribs, originally found by George McJunkin, an ex-slave cowboy, and later excavated in 1926 near Folsom, New Mexico. Clovis sites have since been identified throughout all of the contiguous United States, as well as Mexico and Central America.

The Clovis people, also known as Paleo-Indians, and are generally 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 recently contested by various archaeological finds which are claimed to be much older. (See: Monte Verde)

Description

A hallmark of Clovis culture is the use of a distinctively-shaped fluted rock spear point, known as the Clovis point. The Clovis point is distinctively bifacial and fluted on both sides, a feature that possibly allowed the point to be mounted onto a spear in a way so that the point would snap off on impact. 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 non-Clovis people. It is generally accepted that Clovis people hunted mammoth: sites abound where Clovis points are found mixed in with mammoth remains. Whether they drove the mammoth to extinction via overhunting them--the so-called Pleistocene overkill hypothesis--is still an open, and controversial, question.

In 1929 James Ridgley Whiteman, age 19, discovered the Clovis Man Site in the Blackwater Draw in Eastern New Mexico. Proof is the letters and fluted points Whiteman mailed to Smithonian Institute in Washington, D.C. The letters are still on file. In the Dec. 2000 National Georgraphic magazine says that Whiteman was the discoverer. Whiteman died on Aug. 20, 2003, in Clovis, New Mexico.

Clovis first vs. pre-Clovis

Since the mid 20th century, the standard theory among archaelogists has been 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 has 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.

Alternative theories

Pre-Clovis sites

Many Archaeologists have long debated the possible existence of a culture older than Clovis in North and South America. Some archaeologists have claimed that certain sites contain pre-Clovis artifacts. Archaeologists do not currently agree, however, that anything found at these sites establishes a human presence prior to Clovis.

One such site, Monte Verde in Chile, appear to have remains from before Clovis mixed with Clovis technology.

Another candidate for a pre-Clovis site is Topper in South Carolina, where in 2004 there were found worked stone tools that have been dated by radiocarbon techniques to 50,000 years ago, although there is currently significant dispute regarding these dates.

A third candidate for a pre-Clovis site is Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Coastal migration route

Recent studies of the mitochondrial DNA of First Nations/Native Americans suggests 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 organisms indicate the presence of a diverse fauna persisting in refugia throughout the Pleistocene ice ages along the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia; some of the taxa purported to have survived in these refugia include organisms eaten by aboriginal coastal people, indicating the ecological 'feasibility' of a coastal migration of humans.

Solutrean hypothesis

Another controversial hypothesis proposed in 1999 by Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford and colleague Bruce Bradley, suggests that the Clovis people were descended from the Solutrean people who lived in southern Europe between about 21,000-17,000 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 spear 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, support a possible link between the Clovis people and Solutrean people in Europe. The idea is also supported by mitochondrial DNA analysis (see Map in Single-origin hypothesis) which has found that some members of some native North American tribes have a maternal ancestry (called haplogroup X), which appears to be more closely linked to the maternal ancestors of some present day individuals in Europe and western Asia than to the ancestors of any present-day individuals in eastern Asia.

Opponents of the hypothesis that the Solutreans crossed the Atlantic point to the difficulty of the ocean crossing, as well as the lack of art work (such as that found at Lascaux in France) among the Clovis people, as indicative that no such link exists. However, evidence suggests that canoes built previous to 9500 BC have been found.

References

External links

CNN article on the South Carolina discoveries
40,000 year old human footprints in Puebla, Mexico
Clovis and Solutrean: Is There a Common Thread? by James M. Chandler
Stone Age Columbus BBC TV programme summary
Possible pre-Clovis Site in Ohio

Pre-Columbian cultures | Archaeological cultures | Prehistory

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