Clovis hunters not the first in North America
OCT 21, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025660
BBC : New radio carbon dating and DNA tests of a mastodon rib with a bone spear point embedded in it show that the spear point was itself fashioned from mastodon bone—13 800 years ago, some 800 years before the arrival of the Clovis hunters who were once thought to be the first inhabitants of North America. Michael Waters of Texas A&M University and colleagues used accelerator-based mass spectrometry to date specific amino acids they extracted from the collagen in the bone. Computed tomography, which creates 3D x-ray images of objects, showed how the spear point had been sharpened to a needle-like point. The fact that humans in North America had effective hunting technologies well before the Clovis people suggests that Ice Age fauna may have had to contend with greater hunting pressures, much earlier, than previously thought.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
