Clovis people may have hunted elephant-like prey, not just mammoths
Traces of ancient American culture also discovered farther south than expected
By Bruce Bower
Ancient North America’s Clovis people, known as mammoth and mastodon hunters of the Great Plains, may have started out as gomphothere hunters of northwestern Mexico.
New finds indicate for the first time that Clovis people killed these now-extinct elephant-like creatures. What’s more, Clovis people did so from the culture’s early days in a region well south of the best-known Clovis sites. Clovis culture peaked between 13,000 and 12,600 years ago and its members may have been ancestors of today’s Native Americans (SN: 3/22/14, p. 6).