American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—A new analysis* of stable isotope data gathered from the only known representative of the ancient Paleoindian Clovis culture – an 18-month-old boy referred to as Anzick-1, who lived roughly 12,800 years ago in what is now Montana – has shown that his mother subsisted on a diet heavy in mammoth meat. Elk, bison, and a now-extinct genus of camel (Camelops) together ranked a distant second, with little evidence for smaller animals or plants contributing dietary protein. Moreover, the child’s isotopic “fingerprint” (inherited directly from his mother, as he was likely still breastfeeding) most closely resembles that of the extinct scimitar cat (Homotherium serum), known to be a mammoth specialist. James Chatters and colleagues suggest that their results lend substantial support to a long-debated hypothesis that the Western Clovis people were accomplished hunters, specializing in mammoth and other large animals – and not generalist foragers, as suggested by a competing hypothesis. “Our results provide direct evidence for Western Clovis diets at ~12,800 cal yr B.P.,” the authors write, noting that their analysis also comports with prior zooarchaeological evidence, including strong representation of mammoth remains across known Clovis faunal assemblages. “Collectively, these data suggest that Western Clovis people (represented by Anzick-1) were more focused on larger-bodied megafaunal grazers, primarily Mammuthus, and were not generalists who regularly consumed smaller-bodied herbivores.” To date, only three individuals have been identified as likely members of the Clovis culture. Of these, Anzick-1 is the only one that was both found in close association with Clovis artifacts and for whom researchers could generate an isotopic fingerprint from bone collagen. Found accidentally in 1968, analyses of Anzick-1 yielded genetic data in addition to isotopic fingerprinting, before the individual was repatriated and reinterred in 2014. Accordingly, Chatters et al. relied entirely on these previously published data for their analyses of Anzick-1’s maternal diet. They then gathered isotopic fingerprints for a variety of possible prey species that shared time and space with the Western Clovis culture – some previously published and some gained from new analyses. They plugged these profiles into three different dietary mixing models to generate a suite of likely diets for Anzick-1’s mother. They also did the same for several contemporaneous predator species for comparison, and saw that the scimitar cat – strongly suspected to be a mammoth specialist – offered the closest match. “Our findings are consistent with the Clovis megafaunal specialist model, using sophisticated technology and high residential mobility to subsist on the highest ranked prey, an adaptation allowing them to rapidly expand across the Americas south of the Pleistocene ice sheets,” Chatters et al. conclude.
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Location of Anzick site, faunal samples (circles) used in this study, and major Clovis sites (triangles). Glacial ice at 12,800 cal yr B.P. (72). Chatters et al., Sci. Adv. 10, eadr3814 (2024)
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A larger version of the submitted cover art depicting findings of the study. The image was created in a collaboration between the artist, Eric Carlson (Desert Archaeology, Inc.) and archaeologists Ben Potter (University of Alaska Fairbanks) and Jim Chatters (McMaster University).
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Article Source: AAAS news release.
*Mammoth featured heavily in Western Clovis diet, Science Advances, 4-Dec-2024. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr3814
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