PEOPLING × TECHNOLOGY
The Clovis Culture
~13,000 years ago
Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial
Clovis is the oldest widespread archaeological complex defined in North America, recognised by a distinctive weapon tip: flakes were struck from the base of a stone point to thin it, leaving the channel called a flute. Fluting is hard to learn and costly to carry out, yet it was used across the continent; mechanical tests on replicas indicate that a fluted base takes up and spreads the shock of impact, which would have made a point last longer far from any known source of workable stone. Thirty-two radiocarbon ages from ten sites place the complex between about 13,050 and 12,750 calibrated years before present, three centuries at most. The same record has it appearing at the end of a warm phase and vanishing as the Younger Dryas cold snap begins, alongside the loss of the last North American proboscideans.
Why it matters
Clovis long stood as the oldest unequivocal evidence of humans in the Americas, and losing that standing changed the question. The radiocarbon work that narrowed the complex to three centuries also showed people living in the Americas before it, so Clovis reads as a technique spreading through populations already in place rather than as a founding migration. The genome of an infant buried with Clovis tools in Montana carries the Siberian ancestry found in living Native Americans, and its authors read the child as belonging to a population directly ancestral to many of them.
Dating & uncertainty
The bounds come from thirty-two radiocarbon ages on bone, charcoal and charred plant remains, whose calibration gives a maximum range of about 13,050 to 12,750 years before present. A window three centuries wide limits what the complex can explain, since a technique cannot cause a process that began before it. An earlier revision, published in 2007, gave 11,050 to 10,800 radiocarbon years: not a rival estimate but the same scale read before calibration, radiocarbon years and calendar years parting company by some two thousand at this depth.
Sources
- Waters et al. (2020), Science Advances · The age of Clovis-13,050 to 12,750 cal yr B.P.doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaz0455
- Waters et al. (2007), Science · Redefining the Age of Clovis: Implications for the Peopling of the Americasdoi:10.1126/science.1137166
- Rasmussen et al. (2014), Nature · The genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montanadoi:10.1038/nature13025
- Thomas et al. (2017), Journal of Archaeological Science · Explaining the origin of fluting in North American Pleistocene weaponrydoi:10.1016/j.jas.2017.03.004
Our species’ history as one day
23:00:3459 min 26 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day