Since this subject has come up a few times I thought I would share this article. I've actually been looking for it for some time, but the Society of American Archaeologists just opened up some archived materials as a tribute to the late Dr. George Frison. The article might not be suitable to the squeamish, and comes from a different era.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/3239928BC497065FCB5B6F48C6A4E6A6/S0002731600075077a.pdf/experimental_use_of_clovis_weaponry_and_tools_on_african_elephants.pdf



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/07/2020 10:11AM by Richard the Bad.

Interesting...

"With regard to elephant behavior, the writer feels confident that Clovis weaponry could be used to inflict crippling and/or lethal wounds on members of African elephant families on a regular and predictable basis. However, a strategy of procurement based on direct confrontation of a family of elephants with Clovis weaponry seems highly improbable. Clovis weaponry cannot be depended on to drop quickly and reliably a charging matriarch or even younger and smaller elephants as can be done using high-powered rifles. The umbrella of protection provided by the matriarch is not to be regarded lightly by anyone attempting to harm any family member (Figure 12). On the other hand, if a strategy of eliminating the matriarch was developed by Clovis groups, the remainder of the family could then have been killed. "

I wonder why the Clovis posters here didn't respond?

It's an interesting article but doesn't have much to do with the Pre-Clovis/Clovis First debate, a debate that is in any event largely settled. How technology may have affected the megafauna is a fascinating secondary question.

No, it doesn't address that no longer existing debate. Some of the people on the list have shown interest in atlatls, so I thought it might be of interest. It's also an amazing piece of experimental archaeology by one of my mentors. RIP Doc.

Oh, I find it fascinating and have not only read but printed out and filed a copy. I was a bit chagrined by the smaller type face, but that's what one gets with 30-year-old papers!

I don't imagine atlatls killed a lot of megafauna when it was much easier to drive the animals over cliffs.

Assuming you had a cliff, with the necessary amount of drop, handy.

Assuming you could actually drive them. Most of the known kills occurred in boggy or marshy areas, where their mobility would have been compromised.

Now I have to get some popcorn for the impending Clovis debacle.

You will need some mammoth container.

:)

My popcorn's cold, people!

CLOVIS. NOW.

Who were they? Where did they come from? When did they live? Did they whack rocks on flint or shale or whatever to make tools? Was Nova right or wrong about the tools? They showed some dude *making* them. C'mon, now!

Thank you.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2020 09:05PM by Beth.

When you wrote "debacle" and not debate?

There isn't a lot of debate about the Clovis people; unlike Nephites and Lamanites, they actually existed, and their culture spread across North America ~13kya. Clovis artifacts have been found in every one of the lower 48 states.

https://www.npr.org/2014/02/13/276021092/ancient-dna-ties-native-americans-from-two-continents-to-clovis

The DNA from the Anzick Clovis Child showed it belonged to a population that was ancestral to today's Native Americans; the issue is whether there were other groups as well.

Google is your friend, seriously. One more:

>>https://www.thoughtco.com/guide-to-the-pre-clovis-americas-173068

>>In 2017, a special issue of the journal Quaternary International based on a 2016 symposium at the Society for American Archaeology meetings presented several arguments dismissing pre-Clovis theoretical underpinnings. Not all the papers denied pre-Clovis sites, but several did.

>>Among the papers, some of the scholars asserted that Clovis was, in fact, the first colonizers of the Americas and that genomic studies of the Anzick burials (which share DNA with modern indigenous groups) prove that.

>>Archaeologist Jesse Tune and colleagues have suggested that all of the so-called pre-Clovis sites are made up of geo-facts, micro-debitage too small to be confidently assigned to human manufacture.

In an effort to keep a dead debate alive, you cite an NPR report from 2014 and a review of a 2016 conference at which some researchers disagreed with the pre-Clovis consensus? Why don't you have anything more recent than 2016? And why no references to anything but a couple of items in the popular media?

The biggest issue, however, is your treatment of DNA. You accept it in the case of the Anzick Child--although you just misreprestened the genetic conclusion yet again--but you insist on ignoring all the DNA evidence of migrations and timing published since the early 2010s. It is only through that willful blindness that you can contend Clovis First is still viable.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2020 10:43PM by Lot's Wife.

/ignore

repeat

/ignore

Here - I'll finish that sentence for you.

SL Cabbie Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When you wrote "debacle" and not debate?


, you probably meant "debacle."

Go, Clovis, Go!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2020 11:37PM by Beth.

Cabbie, you've already acknowledged the existence of pre-clovis. I'm confused.

He admitted that inadvertently, when you tricked him into it. Since then Cabbie has argued that the issue is not decided and that a wait-and-see attitude is best.

So while the rest of the world thinks the debate is settled, Cabbie won't go there. He wants to give himself some cover, a reason to claim his long adherence was academically logical rather than just a stubborn refusal to recognize what is now decades of science.

He'll never say "I was among the very many students of Native American prehistory who was wrong and who have in our passion for truth changed our views in light of new archaeological and genetic research."

mammoth container.