Clovis culture

The Clovis culture is an archaeological culture from the Paleoindian period of North America, spanning around 13,050 to 12,750 years Before Present (BP). The type site is Blackwater Draw locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, where stone tools were found alongside the remains of Columbian mammoths in 1929. Clovis sites have been found across North America. The most distinctive part of the Clovis culture toolkit are Clovis points, which are projectile points with a fluted, lanceolate shape. Clovis points are typically large, sometimes exceeding 10 centimetres (3.9 in) in length. These points were multifunctional, also serving as cutting tools. Other stone tools used by the Clovis culture include knives, scrapers, and bifacial tools, with bone tools including beveled rods and shaft wrenches, with possible ivory points also being identified. Hides, wood, and natural fibers may also have been utilized, though no direct evidence of this has been preserved. Clovis artifacts are often found grouped together in caches where they had been stored for later retrieval, and over 20 Clovis caches have been identified.

The Clovis peoples are thought to have been highly mobile groups of hunter-gatherers. It is generally agreed that these groups were reliant on hunting big game (megafauna). Clovis peoples had a particularly strong association with mammoths, and to a lesser extent with mastodon, gomphothere, bison, and horse; they also consumed smaller animals and plants. The Clovis hunters may have contributed to the Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions in North America, though this idea has been subject to controversy. Only one human burial has been directly associated with tools from the Clovis culture: Anzick-1, a young boy found buried in Montana, who has a close genetic relation to some modern Amerindian populations, primarily in Central and South America. He has also been shown to share DNA with the 24,000-year-old Mal'ta boy from central Siberia.