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The Clovis culture (less frequently referred to as the '''Llano culture''' in the Plains and SW today) is a Prehistoric Native American culture that first appears in the Archaeological record of North America around 11,000 radiocarbon years ago, at the end of the Last Ice Age . Our best guess at present suggests this is equal to roughly 13,000 calender years ago. The culture is named for artifacts found in the Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico . Clovis sites have since been identified throughout much, but not all, of the contiguous United States , as well as Mexico and Central America , and even into Northern South America (see Pearson and Ream in Current Research in the Pleistocene 2005, Volume 22). The Clovis people, one of several ) The Clovis culture seems to have ended at the time of the Younger Dryas cold climate period (hypothesized to be the effect of an Impact Event ). DESCRIPTION A hallmark of Clovis --is still an open, and controversial, question. The greater likelihood is that a combination of climate change, human predation, disease, and additional pressures from newly arrived herbivores (competition) and carnivores (predation) isolated populations and made it impossible for them to reproduce and survive. Alternatively, it has been hypothesized that the Clovis Culture was ended when an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth's atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago. It is important to keep in mind that there is not simply one black mat that blankets the United States at the end of Clovis time. This idea is considerably more controversial than implied by this quote. DISCOVERY A cowboy and former slave, George McJunkin, found an Ancient Bison (an extinct relative of the Buffalo , not a Mammoth ) skeleton with an associated Folsom Point about 1908 after a massive flood. It was first excavated in 1926 , near Folsom, New Mexico under the direction of Harold Cook and Jesse Figgins. In 1929 , 19-year-old James Ridgley Whiteman , discovered the Clovis Man Site in the Blackwater Draw in Eastern New Mexico . Despite earlier legitimate Paleoindian discoveries, the best understood evidence of the Clovis tool complex was excavated in 1932 in Clovis, New Mexico , by a crew under the direction of Edgar Billings Howard from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences/University of Pennsylvania. Howard's crew left their excavation in Burnet Cave, NM (truly the first professionally excavated Clovis site) in August and visited Whiteman and his Blackwater Draw site. In November, Howard was back at Blackwater Draw to investigate additional finds by Whiteman. There may be earlier reports of the Paleoindian layers of the dig in Burnet Cave, but it seems likely that the first report of professional work at a Clovis site concerns the Blackwater Draw site in the November 25, 1932 issue of Science. This directly contradicts statements by some authors (Haynes 2002:56 The Early Settlement of North America) that Dent, Colorado was the first excavated Clovis site. The Dent Site, Weld County, Colorado, was simply a fossil mammoth excavation in 1932. The first Dent Clovis point was found July 7, 1933. The in situ Clovis point from Burnet Cave was excaveted in late August, 1931 and E. B. Howard brought it to the 3rd Pecos Conference and showed it around (see Woodbury 1983). WERE THE CLOVIS PEOPLE THE FIRST AMERICANS? Until recently, the standard theory among archaeologists (known as Clovis First) was that the Clovis people were the first inhabitants of the Americas. The primary support of the theory was that no solid evidence of pre-Clovis human inhabitation had been found. According to the standard accepted theory, the Clovis people crossed the Beringia land bridge over the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska during the period of lowered sea levels during the ice age, then made their way southward through an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains in present-day western Canada as the Glacier s retreated. New evidence, however, indicates the Clovis people may not have been the first people in the Americas. According to researchers Michael Waters and Thomas Stafford of Texas A&M University, new radiocarbon dates show the Clovis users couldn't have spread throughout the two continents in such a short time. A&M University Press Article Alternative theories Pre-Clovis sites Many archaeologists have long debated the possible existence of a culture older than Clovis in North and South America. Archaeologists working at these sites have identified and dated certain artifacts as pre-Clovis, but some of these claims have been disputed by other archaeologists.
Coastal migration route Recent studies of the Mitochondrial DNA of First Nations / Native Americans suggests that the people of the New World may have diverged genetically from Siberians as early as 20,000 years ago, far earlier than the standard theory would suggest. According to one alternative theory, the Pacific coast of North America may have been free of ice such as to allow the first peoples in North America to come down this route prior to the formation of the ice-free corridor in the continental interior. No solid evidence has yet been found to support this hypothesis except that genetic analysis of coastal marine life indicate diverse fauna persisting in refugia throughout the Pleistocene ice ages along the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia; these refugia include common food sources of coastal aboriginal peoples, suggesting that a migration along the coastline was feasible at the time. Solutrean hypothesis The controversial Solutrean Hypothesis proposed in 1999 by Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford and colleague Bruce Bradley (Stanford and Bradley 2002), suggests that the Clovis people could have inherited technology from the Solutrean people who lived in southern Europe 21,000-15,000 years ago, and who created the first Stone Age artwork in present-day southern France . The link is suggested by the similarity in technology between the projectile points of the Solutreans and those of the Clovis people. Such a theory would require that the Solutreans crossed via the edge of the pack ice in the North Atlantic Ocean that then extended to the Atlantic coast of France. They could have done this using survival skills similar to those of the modern Inuit people. Supporters of this hypothesis suggest that stone tools found at Cactus Hill (an early American site in Virginia ), that are knapped in a style between Clovis and Solutrean, support a possible link between the Clovis people and Solutrean people in Europe. Mitochondrial DNA analysis (see Map in Single-origin Hypothesis ) has found that some members of some native North American tribes have a maternal ancestry (called Haplogroup X ) (Schurr 2000), which appears to be more closely linked to the maternal ancestors of some present day individuals in Europe and western Asia than to the ancestors of any present-day individuals in eastern Asia. University Of New Mexico anthropologist Lawrence G. Straus, a primary critic of the Solutrean hypothesis, points to the theoretical difficulty of the ocean crossing, a lack of Solutrean-specific features in pre-Clovis artifacts, as well as the lack of art (such as that found at Lascaux in France) among the Clovis people, as major deficiencies in the Solutrean hypothesis. The 3,000 to 5,000 radiocarbon year gap between the Solutrean period of France and Spain and the Clovis of the New World also makes such a connection problematic (Straus 2000). In response, defenders of the hypothesis state that the Solutreans introduced a tool-making innovation and not necessarily cultural or artistic practices. Though there is far more portable art in Clovis than even most archaeologists seem to be away of. Take the Clovis incised stones from Gault and Blackwater Draw for example. SEE ALSO REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
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