What happened to the Clovis people?

[David B]

And to the mega fauna around at the time?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture

Until I recently watched a documentary presenting a cometary hypothesis, I'd rather uncritically assumed that they killed off their prey.

I seem to recall Jared Diamond saying something about the possible lack of defensive skills of big game in a continent suddenly invaded b y man, in contrast to the Old World, where man and game would have co-evolved over tens of thousands of years, which sort of made sense.

But the documentary suggested something rather quicker than that, and claimed that there was evidence of massive wildfires and other evidence that could be associated with a cometary air burst on a much larger scale than Tunguska.

I now find, more than a decade out of date, that others think that there is evidence that a relatively nearby supernova might be implicated.

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/NSD-mammoth-extinction.html

But “The potassium-40 in the Clovis layer is much more abundant than potassium-40 in the solar system. This isotope is formed in considerable excess in an exploding supernova, and has mostly decayed since the Earth was formed,” says Firestone. “We therefore believe that whatever hit the Earth 13,000 years ago originated from a recently exploded supernova.”

Seems bizarre to me.

A comet forming out of supernova debris in deep space?

Nah!!!

A pre-existing comet being peppered with stellar debris, and the shock wave, and/or other factors, setting into a near sun orbit?

Hmm! Maybe. I spose.

Further - the documentary, IIRC, claimed that above the alleged charcoal layer no more Clovis points have been found.

But I now find this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_event

On September 27, 2007, a paper presenting the findings of the Acapulco group was pre-published online at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website. According to the study, the impact event may have led to an immediate decline in human populations in North America at that time.[3]

Almost a year later, a study published in August 2008 states "The results of the analyses were not consistent with the predictions of extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. No evidence of a population decline among the Paleoindians at 12,900 ± 100 calBP was found. Thus, minimally, the study suggests the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis should be amended." [4]

So I'm still in the dark about something I find quite interesting.

David B (wonders wtf happened to the Clovis people)

[VoxRat]

I don't have anything specific to add; there may have been non-anthropogenic factors I don't know about. But I find it pretty compelling that you just happen to have megafaunal extinctions in North America and Australia that just happen to coincide with human invasions in those two places, tens of thousands of years apart. (I'm not familiar with the situation in South America, but I'd be willing to make a small bet that the same coincidence will turn up.)

[SteveF]

Don't have time for an especially in depth post, but check this paper out from the "humans wot dunnit" perspective:

http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~alroy/pdfs/2001-Science-292-1893.pdf

[Steviepinhead]

I also find it interesting to wonder why the megafauna weren't hunted to extinction -- or pushed over the last brink (mild pun in there), if there's evidence that they were already stressed in other ways (climate change, whatever) -- earlier.

I mean, assuming that the evidence of earlier occupations in the Americas is gradually winning acceptance.

What's occurred to me along these lines is that most of those earlier occupations are confined to coastal areas, or areas not too far inland from the coast along waterways.

And, of course, that there was a final burst of Ice Age going on, in the inner portions of northern North America, which presumably involved considerable mountain glaciation and heavy montane snowpacks, even in areas not actually overlain by the great continental ice-fields themselves.

So, could we have an initial occupation of the coastlines?

--Maybe just via the island chains off NE Asia and NW America;
--Maybe including some sparse settlement along the east coast, either somehow from NW Europe -- though this presents some practical difficulties, it seems to me -- or, (possibly more likely, depending on how the dating of the various caves and shelters lines up), from colonists crossing over from the west coast, though I don't have a particular route in mind (across Latin America, south and north of the likely reach of mountain glaciation, and thence into the Caribbean Basin? around the tip of South America, though I see some climate-related problems with that?)--

Anyway, you would have populations established in "glacial refuges" along the coasts.

Then the end of the Ice Age comes, and routes through the Andes and the Cascades and the Sierras and the other glaciated cordilleras become practicable (or, maybe, at some point, one revives the "Ice Free Corridor" in order to import some more NE Asians) open up, and at last man confronts megabeasts, just in time for the Clovis technology to arise and flourish until all the beasties were killed off and other ways of making a living in the interior had to be devised.

Does deadman or somebody else have any sort of handy overview of dates and locations for putative pre-Clovis archaeological sites in the Americas?

[Rathpig]

Does deadman or somebody else have any sort of handy overview of dates and locations for putative pre-Clovis archaeological sites in the Americas?

I would be interested if anyone has studied this extensively to hear their opinion based on archaeological resources.


This is far from my specific field, but a relatively "sudden" end to the Clovis technology is an early example of numerous "sudden" technological ends in the Americas. We are not literally talking about a physical end to the people as a whole but mainly a sudden change in tool construction signifying a larger adaptation change.

The extraterrestrial impact explanation seems plausible due to the known existence of unique carbon layers above which Clovis is nonexistent, but this doesn't discount that fauna destruction or climate change lead to a fragile cultural situation. Mississippian and Mayan cultures also experienced a rather sudden decline created by numerous similar environmental factors including a period of climate change from either volcanic or extraterrestrial impact.

The Americas are interesting because we can study specific cultural rise and decline in a relatively pristine condition. It is probable that similar sudden technological change has occurred world-wide throughout history. Could we access existing their material culture, it may appear much like the Clovis decline.

[SteveF]

I would be interested if anyone has studied this extensively to hear their opinion based on archaeological resources.

I did a grad course whilst at UCSC called The Peopling of North America and looked into all of this quite closely. I have tried to keep an interest up but the specifics aren't at hand right now. I'll try and look something up in the meantime.

Of course, by way of starter, there is the classic and controversial (more the former than the latter now) site of Monte Verde in Chile:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde

[SteveF]

It is probable that similar sudden technological change has occurred world-wide throughout history. Could we access existing their material culture, it may appear much like the Clovis decline.

There are other such places where this link has been made. Climate change and civilization "collapses" in Latin America and the Med for example. Here is one such paper:

"Climate change and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire: Evidence from the deep-sea"

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/%7Epeter/Resources/Publications/Cullen.et.al.2000.pdf

[Steviepinhead]

Yeah, I'm not supposing that the Clovis went extinct ("culturally" or "technologically," yes, maybe, but "genetically," no, probably not); I would assume that they "morphed" or were forced to morph into a different culture leaving behind a different technology.

Interestingly, my query above -- about the degree of detail with which (alleged) pre-Clovis sites in the Americas may have been "mapped" out in space and time, all in one handy spot, to test my hunch that the pre-Clovis sites must be ocean (or near-ocean riverine), or at least accessible from the ocean via non-glaciated passes/lowlands -- has been "mirrored" to an extent by a debate on another forum regarding the demise of the Neanderthals.

A couple of the posters have argued strongly for a direct "hit" from incoming Homo sap. saps. That is, either the HSS waged a (possibly prolonged and difficult to distinguish from intertribal skirmishing/raiding) against the NSS, or brought in novels diseases/parasites, or out-reproduced, or "actively" displaced the NSS in some other fashion, or some or all of tha above. In short, analagous to HSS wiping out the mega-fauna on this or that island or continent fairly quickly after HSS's first entrada to said island or continent...

And I had the same kind of question: are the dates and ages of occupations of all the known NSS and Cro-Magnon (or whatever we want to call the incoming HSS -- Aurignacian?) sites mapped out somewhere? You'd think if there was a "replacement" of NSS by HSS, that you'd see only NSS sites in Europe before some date, then a few HSS sites along the fringes or beginning to push in along major river corridors, then fewer and fewer NSS sites beginning to be confined to the margins and refugia, with HSS almost everywhere, then NSS in a last one or two occupations (Iberia?), then all HSS.

Of course, correlation wouldn't be causation, but you'd think if there were some other major driver -- climate, or loss of major prey species, or something -- that you'd get a different pattern.

By "mapping," I'm trying to get at something like this phrase from the abstract of the "humans wot dunnit" paper linked by SteveF above:
the temporal overlap of humans and extinct species