Clovis culture

Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleoamerican archaeological culture, named for distinct stone and bone tools found in close association with Pleistocene fauna, particularly two Columbian mammoths, at Blackwater Locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1936 and 1937, though Paleoindian artifacts had been found at the site since the 1920s. It existed from roughly 11,500 to 10,800 BCE (≈13,500-12,800 years Before Present) near the end of the Last Glacial Period.

Clovis culture is characterized by the manufacture of "Clovis points" and distinctive bone and ivory tools, and it is represented by hundreds of sites, from which over 10,000 Clovis points have been recovered. Knowledge of the Clovis culture has primarily been gathered from North America. In South America, the similar related Fishtail or Fell projectile point style was contemporaneous to the usage of Clovis points in North America, and possibly developed from Clovis points.

The only human burial that has been directly associated with tools from the Clovis culture included the remains of an infant boy found in Montana that researchers named Anzick-1. Paleogenetic analyses of Anzick-1's ancient nuclear, mitochondrial, and Y-chromosome DNA reveal that Anzick-1 is closely related to some modern Native American populations, including those in Southern North America, Central America, and South America and populations in Central Asia and Siberia, which lends support to the Beringia or coastal Pacific hypotheses that they were responsible for the initial settlement of the Americas.

The Clovis culture is traditionally considered to have been based on highly mobile hunter-gatherer populations that heavily engaged in big game hunting, though some recent scholarship has questioned how reliant Clovis hunters were on big game. Some recent experimental research casts doubt on whether Clovis points were well-suited for hunting mammoth at all, and suggests they were more often used as knives; however, a counterargument supports the traditional interpretation of points as effective hunting weapons used on large game, including mammoth and other proboscideans.

The Clovis culture was replaced by several more localized regional societies from the Younger Dryas cold-climate period onward. Post-Clovis cultures include the Folsom tradition, Gainey, Suwannee, Simpson, Plainview-Goshen, Cumberland, and Redstone. Each of these is thought to derive directly from Clovis, in some cases apparently differing only in the length of the fluting on their projectile points. Although this is generally held to be the result of normal cultural change through time, numerous other reasons have been suggested as driving forces to explain changes in the archaeological record, such as the Younger Dryas postglacial climate change, and the decline and extinction of North American megafauna as part of the Late Pleistocene extinctions. The potential causal role of Clovis hunters in the extinction of the megafauna has been the subject of controversy.

After the discovery of several Clovis sites in western North America in the 1930s (such as Blackwater Draw, NM and Dent, CO), the Clovis people came to be regarded as the first human inhabitants who created a widespread culture in the Americas and the ancestors of most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. While historically many scholars held to a "Clovis first" model, where Clovis represented the earliest inhabitants in the Americas, today this is largely rejected, with several generally accepted sites across the Americas being dated to at least a thousand years older than the oldest Clovis sites.