Paleoanthropologists have found that the Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) was the largest contributor to the diet of the Clovis people — the earliest widespread group of hunter-gatherers to inhabit North America, followed by elk and bison/camel, while the contribution of small mammals was negligible.
An artist’s reconstruction of Clovis life 13,000 years ago shows the Anzick-1 infant with his mother consuming mammoth meat near a hearth. Another individual crafts tools, including dart projectile points and atlatls. A mammoth butchery area is visible nearby. Image credit: Eric Carlson / Ben Potter / Jim Chatters.
The Clovis people inhabited North America around 13,000 years ago.
During that time period, megafaunal animals like mammoths lived across both northern Asia and the Americas.
They migrated long distances, which made them a reliable fat- and protein-rich resource for highly mobile humans.
Some researchers contend that the Clovis people were megafaunal specialists to some extent, focusing particularly on mammoths, while others have argued that such an adaptation was not viable, and thus, Clovis populations were more likely broad-spectrum foragers, regularly incorporating in their diet small game, plants, and perhaps fish.
“The focus on mammoths helps explain how Clovis people could spread throughout North America and into South America in just a few hundred years,” said Dr. James Chatters, a researcher at McMaster University.
“What’s striking to me is that this confirms a lot of data from other sites,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks Professor Ben Potter.
“For example, the animal parts left at Clovis sites are dominated by megafauna, and the projectile points are large, affixed to darts, which were efficient distance weapons.”
In the new research, Dr. Chatters, Professor Potter and their colleagues used stable isotope analysis to model the diet of the mother of an 18-month-old child discovered at the 13,000-year-old Clovis site of Anzick in Montana, the United States.
Their findings support the hypothesis that Clovis people specialized in hunting large animals rather than primarily foraging for smaller animals and plants.
“Hunting mammoths provided a flexible way of life,” Professor Potter said.
“It allowed the Clovis people to move into new areas without having to rely on smaller, localized game, which could vary significantly from one region to the next.”
“This mobility aligns with what we see in Clovis technology and settlement patterns.”
“They were highly mobile. They transported resources like toolstone over hundreds of miles.”
“Isotopes provide a chemical fingerprint of a consumer’s diet and can be compared with those from potential diet items to estimate the proportional contribution of different diet items,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks’s Dr. Mat Wooller.
The researchers compared the mother’s stable isotopic fingerprint to those from a wide variety of food sources from the same time period and region.
They found that about 40% of her diet came from mammoth, with other large animals like elk and bison making up the rest.
Small mammals, sometimes thought to have been an important food source, played a very minor role in her diet.
Finally, the scientists compared the mother’s diet to those of other omnivores and carnivores from the same time period, including American lions, bears and wolves.
The mother’s diet was most similar to that of the scimitar cat, a mammoth specialist.
The findings also suggest that early humans may have contributed to the extinction of large ice age animals, especially as environmental changes reduced their habitats.
“If the climate is changing in a way that reduces the suitable habitat for some of these megafauna, then it makes them potentially more susceptible to human predation. These people were very effective hunters,” Professor Potter said.
“You had the combination of a highly sophisticated hunting culture — with skills honed over 10,000 years in Eurasia — meeting naïve populations of megafauna under environmental stress,” Dr. Chatters said.
The team’s results appear today in the journal Science Advances.
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James C. Chatters et al. 2024. Mammoth featured heavily in Western Clovis diet. Science Advances 10 (49); doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adr3814
