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I like to use the term people rather than Man. As my wife and sister like to remind me, there were women too!
Clovis people were hunters and gatherers who lived during the Ice Age and carried with them a tool kit of Old World derivation. Their archaeological remains and group mobility were unlike those of modern hunter-gatherers because Clovis bands probably moved their camps many times a year. Those were typically small, consisting of twenty to fifty people. Band organization was egalitarian, which means that there were no formal leaders and no social ranking or classes. Except for differences of age, sex, and personal qualities, individuals were considered equals.
Because there were few Clovis hunter-gatherer bands in the Americas, their archaeological sites are small and scattered across the landscape. They created a variety of sites, including big-game kill and scavenging sites, stone quarries, workshops, base camps, short-term camps, burials, caches, and a seemingly infinite number of areas of more limited activity. Unlike later sites, the remains of Clovis camps contain no evidence of permanent housing and little refuse or features such as pits and fireplaces. Hunting sites occur where Clovis people could ambush game at the margins of bogs, ponds, slow-moving streams, river confluences, shallow fords, major game trails, and mineral springs. The larger campsites appear where there are outcrops of large masses of high-quality stone for tool making. Such sites often were reused year after year. Nearly all of the Clovis sites are in areas where game could have been obtained, processed, or monitored.
During the Ice Age, although America’s climate was cooler than it is today, it was extremely erratic and subject to rapid and profound changes. Most of the country was covered in an ever-changing mosaic of vegetation. Some areas were patches of open grasslands, while others were dense hardwood forests. Ice Age animals, referred to as “megamammals”—such as mammoths, mastodons, bison, giant ground sloths, camels, moose-elk, horse, musk ox, giant beavers, tapirs, and peccaries—roamed the countryside along with modern game such as caribou, elk, deer, antelope, turkeys, rabbits, turtles, and snakes.
As the climate changed, so did the distribution of plants and animals. Since environmental change was constant, the geographic extent and abundance of trees and grasses changed continuously because every species has its own individual tolerance of climatic change. It is unlikely that vegetation stability existed anywhere in America during the Ice Age. Concurrent with changes in vegetation, animal communities were reorganized, their ranges shifted, and some thirty species of megamammals became extinct. The question of why they became extinct remains unanswered. Were these animals unable to respond to the rapidly changing environment, were they hunted into extinction, or was it a combination of both pressures?
Clovis hunter-gatherers responded to these environmental changes in several ways. They shifted their hunting grounds from open areas with low relief to the more rugged, closed terrain of the mountains. This shift accompanied a significant change in food getting, from specialized big-game hunting to more generalized foraging in which smaller animals became a more important source of protein. Many of these changes in livelihood were associated with the disappearance of the megamammals. Unlike big game, which often is concentrated in herds, small food animals such as deer, turkeys, and rabbits are more dispersed. Access to evenly spread small game does not require people to move as often or far as does the hunt for megamammals. Thus, environmental change eventually brought Clovis hunters into every region of North America, including Ohio.
Dr. Tankersley
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