Clovis-era mammoth cache of 83 tools found near Boulder, Colorado

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Key facts

• Clovis fluted Paleoindian points date to roughly 13,000-12,000 years ago, and thousands have been found across the Great Plains.
• The Mammoth Cache outside Boulder, Colorado contained 83 Clovis tools buried together, possibly stashed for future use.
• Residue analysis on cache tools showed butchery of camels; camels went extinct in North America at the end of the last ice age, roughly 12,000 years ago, giving a terminus ante quem for the cache.
• The Lovewell mammoth, excavated by Steve Holen, shows a spiral fracture but no projectile points, so it is not treated as a pre-Clovis kill.
• Debated pre-Clovis candidates such as Gault are described as sparse and ephemeral; full plains-wide human travel appears to begin only in the Clovis period.
• The Clovis world included megafauna: mammoths, mastodons, camels and ground sloth.
• At the Aubrey site the faunal assemblage includes rabbits, voles, lemmings, ground sloth, fish, frogs and salamanders, so whether all Clovis groups were big-game specialists is debated.
• At the Lell mammoth site in Wyoming, red ochre carried from roughly 100 km away was used to stain the ground, and no clear painted motifs were recovered.
• A painted bison skull from Oklahoma, found alongside a Folsom point, may be about 12,000 years old and is a candidate for the oldest art in North America; a reproduction is displayed at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma.

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