The Pre-Clovis culture, also spelled Preclovis and sometimes PreClovis, is the name given by

archaeologists to the people who colonized the American continents before the Clovis big-
game hunters. The existence of Pre-Clovis sites has been widely discounted up until the past
fifteen years or so, although evidence has slowly been growing and most of the archaeological
community support these and other such dated sites.

Ayer Pond (Washington, USA)

Ayer Pond is a Pre-Clovis site in the United States near the south end of Vancouver Island. At
this site, workmen excavated a buffalo, butchered by Pre-Clovis people about 11,900
radiocarbon years ago. More

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Cactus Hill (Virginia, USA)

Cactus Hill is an important Clovis period site located on the Nottaway River of Virginia, with
a possible pre-Clovis site below it, dated to between 18,000 and 22,000 years ago. The
PreClovis site is redeposited, apparently, and the stone tools are somewhat problematic. More

Artifacts from the Pre-Clovis Occupation at Debra L. Friedkin Site. courtesy Michael R.
Waters

Debra L. Friedkin Site (Texas, USA)

The Debra Ll. Friedkin site is a redeposited site, located on a fluvial terrace close to the
famous Clovis and pre-Clovis Gault site. The site includes occupation debris beginning in the
Pre-Clovis period of some 14-16,000 years ago through the Archaic period of 7600 years ago.
More

Guitarrero Cave (Peru)

Guitarrero Cave is a rockshelter in the Ancash region of Peru, where human occupations date
to approximately 12,100 years ago. Fortuitous preservation has allowed researchers to collect
textiles from the cave, dated to the Pre-Clovis component. More
3-D Reconstruction of the Bone Point in Manis Mastodon Rib. Image courtesy of Center for
the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

Manis Mastodon (Washington State, USA)

The Manis Mastodon site is a site in Washington State on the Pacific Coast of North America.
There, some 13,800 years ago, Pre-Clovis hunter-gatherers killed an extinct elephant and,
presumably, had bits of it for dinner. More

Meadowcroft Rockshelter (Pennsylvania, USA)

If Monte Verde was the first site seriously considered as Pre-Clovis, than Meadowcroft
Rockshelter is the site which should have been seriously considered. Discovered on a
tributary stream of the Ohio River in Pennsylvania, Meadowcroft dates to at least 14,500
years ago and shows a technology which is decidedly different from traditional Clovis. More

View of the excavated log foundation of a long residential tent-like structure at Monte Verde
II where seaweeds were recovered from hearths, pits and a floor. Image courtesy of Tom D.
Dillehay
Monte Verde (Chile)

Monte Verde is arguably the first Pre-Clovis site to be taken seriously by the majority of the
archaeological community. The archaeological evidence shows a small group of huts were
built on the shoreline in far southern Chile, about 15,000 years ago. This is a photo essay of
the archaeological investigations. More

Students overlooking the spot where the 14,000 year old coprolites with human DNA were
found in Cave 5, Paisley Caves (Oregon). Northern Great Basin Prehistory Project at the
Paisley Caves

Paisley Caves (Oregon, USA)

Paisley is the name of a handful of caves within the interior of the American state of Oregon
in the Pacific northwest. Fieldschool investigations at this site in 2007 identified a rock-lined
hearth, human coprolites and a midden dated to between 12,750 and 14,290 calendar years
before the present. More

Pedra Furada (Brazil)

Pedra Furada is a rockshelter in northeastern Brazil, where quartz flakes and possible hearths
have been identified dated to between 48,000 and 14,300 years ago. The site is still somewhat
controversial, although the later occupations, dated after 10,000 are accepted. More

Tlapacoya (Mexico)

Tlapacoya is a multicomponent site located in the basin of Mexico, and it includes an

important Olmec component site. Tlapacoya's Pre-Clovis site returned radiocarbon dates
between 21,000 and 24,000 years ago. More

Topper (South Carolina, USA)

The Topper site is in the Savannah River floodplain of the Atlantic coast of South Carolina.
The site is multicomponent, meaning that human occupations later than Pre-Clovis have been
identified, but the two Pre-Clovis component date to 15,000 and 50,000 years ago. The 50,000
is still fairly controversial. More
Excavating at Xaasaa Na in August 2010. Image courtesy of Ben A. Potter

Upward Sun River Mouth Site (Alaska, USA)

The Upward Sun River Mouth Site has four archaeological occupations, the oldest of which is
a Pre-Clovis site with a hearth and animal bones dated to 11,250-11,420 RCYBP. More

http://archaeology.about.com/od/upperpaleolithic/tp/Pre-Clovis-Sites.htm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The archaeological site of Monte Verde is located in southern Chile, on a terrace

of a creek 55 kilometers east of the current Pacific coastline. Discovered in 1977,
the site has completely altered the way archaeologists think about the original
colonization of the American continents. Monte Verde, dated to about 14,600
calendar years before the present (cal BP), is the first convincing evidence for
human presence in the Americas prior to Clovis.

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Egyptian Artifacts

Ancient Roman Artifacts

Kelp

Monte Verde

Paleo Indians

By contrast, Clovis sites (and South America's Fishtail sites) date between 12,800-12,900 cal
BP, and evidence a completely different big-game-hunting lifestyle.

Although many sites have been identified that predate Clovis occupations, most of them are
problematic: either the stratigraphy was odd or the radiocarbon dates were in some ways
suspect. Monte Verde came under intense scrutiny, particularly in the first few years after
formal publication of its results, but thorough excavation and reporting of the site complex
have resulted in a general acceptance among scholars, at least of the uppermost levels.

Based on the results of over 30 years of research, the upper levels of Monte Verde (called
Monte Verde II) represents a small settlement of 20-30 people who built tents and huts, lived
in one place year-round and had a very broad hunter-gatherer-fisher subsistence base. That
may very well have been the typical living style of the original colonists for the Americas.

-------------

The archaeological site of Tlapacoya is a multicomponent settlement located on an island in a

precolumbian lake at the foot of the Tlapacoya volcano, in the central southern Basin of
Mexico. Its earliest noncontroversial occupation dates to about 1500 BC, and perhaps a
couple of hundred years earlier.

Tlapacoya has been occupied pretty much continuously ever since; the settlement during the
Early and Middle Formative period is one of the earliest agricultural settlements in the Basin
of Mexico.

The site has clear evidence of Olmec contact.

Tlapacoya also two localities that have possible preclovis occupations, where presumed
hearths were excavated by Lorena Mirambell and Jose Luis Lorenzo in the 1960s and 1970s.
Radiocarbon dates on the preclovis Tlapacoya occupations are 24,000+/-4000 and 21,700+/-
500 years BP, and an obsidian hydration date on a blade returned a date between 21,250 and
25,000 years before the present.
The earliest occupations at the site remain controversial, because of the varied dates
associated with the volcanic tephra.

Sources

Ortega-Guerreroa, Beatriz and Anthony J.

Newton 1998 Geochemical Characterization of Late Pleistocene and Holocene Tephra Layers
from the Basin of Mexico, Central Mexico. Quaternary Research 50(1):90-106.

Nichols, Deborah. 2001. Tlapacoya (Mxico, Mexico). pp. 757-758 n Archaeology of Ancient
Mexico and Central America: An Encyclopedia, Susan Toby Evans and David L. Webster,
eds. Garland Publishing, Inc. New York.

Thanks to Dar Habel and Jacques Cinq-Mars for current data on Tlapacoya.

Meadowcroft Rockshelter was one of the first archaeological sites in the United
States to contain evidence of pre-Clovis populations, and as such it has always
been controversial. The site is located on the north bank of Cross Creek, a
tributary of the Ohio River in Pennyslvania.

Eleven archaeological levels have been identified at Meadowcroft, ranging at

least from 14,500 years ago through the mid-18th century AD.

Because of the early dates and the perceived potential for contamination from
bituminous coal in the cave, numerous radiocarbon dates--primarily AMS dates--
have been taken, none of which appear to show evidence of that contamination

The earliest component at Meadowcroft is called the Miller Complex, and artifacts associated
with it show a sophisticated stone tool technology with unfluted bifacial points called Miller
lanceolates. These and paleo-environmental reconstruction data suggest that the hunter-
gatherers were using the rockshelter on an occasional basis some 14,000 years ago.

Meadowcroft Rockshelter was first reported in the late 18th century; excavations there have
been conducted by James M.

Adovasio and associates. Although the site created a substantial amount of controversy,
Meadowcroft is still one of the most widely accepted preclovis sites, insofar as there can be
such a thing.

Sources

Adovasio, J. M., J. Donahue, D. R. Pedler, and R. Stuckenrath 1998 Two decades of debate on
Meadowcroft Rockshelter. North American Archaeologist 19(4):317-341.
Adovasio, James M. and Ronald C. Carlisle 1988 The Meadowcroft Rockshelter.

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Science 239:713-714.

------------------------

The Manis Mastodon site is a preclovis site, located on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington
state in the Pacific northwestern United States. It was discovered in 1977 when a farmer
unearthed two mastodon tusks from a pond in a glacial kettle, a marshy depression in the
Sequim Prairie bog within a dense conifer forest.

Pollen studies at Sequim Prairie were conducted in the 1980s. These indicated that at the time
of the occupation, the region was undergoing an arid period, and the site would have been
within an opening dominated by shrubs and other plants that included cactus.

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 Paleo

Mammoth

Egyptian Artifacts

Archaeology

Ancient Roman Artifacts

The region was colonized by coniferous forest between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago.

Manis Site Artifacts

Manis consists of most of the bones of a single male extinct elephant (mastodon), excavated
in 1977-1979. The mastodon lay on its left side within a depression, and the left (lower) half
of the mastodon was fairly intact. Its right (upper) side was missing two bones (the right
femur and right fibula), the rest of the bones were disarticulated (taken apart and scattered)
and the skull was fragmented. Cut marks, spiral fractures and flaking were noted, although
there is no evidence that the bones were weathered or gnawed by carnivores.

No stone tools were identified at the site, but the tip of a bone point is embedded in a rib. The
point was examined by high-resolution computed tomography (CT) and reported in 2011. The
point fragment is 3.5 centimeters (1.4 inches) in length, and 2.15 cm (.85 in) of its length is
embedded in the rib. Scholars calculated the minimum length of the bone point as 27-32 cm
(10.6-12.6 in) long, based on the amount of animal skin and muscle the point would have had
to penetrate to make it into the living rib.

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No bone growth is in evidence around the embedded point, indicating that the mastodon died
soon after it had been attacked. The bone point itself was made from another mastodon's
bones.

Dating Manis
Radiocarbon dates taken during the 1970s on the organic materials within the site averaged
~12,100 RCYBP, earlier than any Clovis occupations, which date between 11,000-10,800
RCYBP. At the time, Clovis was the earliest widely-accepted human culture believed to have
occupied North America, and, because of that, and because there were no stone tools found at
Manis, the site was not accepted by most scholars.

By the early decades of the 20th century, sufficient evidence of occupation within the
Americas predating Clovis had been discovered, leading to additional investigations of Manis,
among many other possible pre-Clovis occupations. A suite of Accelerated Mass
Spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon dates were reported in 2011, on the purified bone collagen
extracted from the mastodon rib in which the bone point is embedded, and from two different
mastodon tusk fragments. These new dates range between 11,890+/-35 to 11,990+/-30
RCYBP, or 13,860-13,763 cal BP, some 800-1,000 years older than Clovis.

Manis and Pre-Clovis

The location of Manis in the Pacific northwest, the identification of bone points, and the new
suite of radiocarbon dates, strongly supports adding Manis to the growing number of accepted
Pre-Clovis occupations in North America. Unlike most other Pre-Clovis sites, Manis, suggest
that megafaunal (large mammal) hunting was part of the subsistence strategy of these little-
known diets of hunter-gatherers. Other sites which reflect such early megafaunal hunting
strategies include Ayer Pond in Washington state, and Hebior and Shaefer sites in Wisconsin.

Sources

This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to Pre-Clovis culture, and the Dictionary
of Archaeology.

Borden CE. 1979. Peopling and Early Cultures of the Pacific Northwest: A view from British
Columbia, Canada. Science 203(4384):963-971.

Petersen KL, Mehringer Jr. PJ, and Gustafson CE. 1983. Late-Glacial Vegetation and Climate
at the Manis Mastodon Site, Olympic Peninsula, Washington. Quaternary Research 20:215-
231.

Waters MR, Stafford Jr. TW, McDonald HG, Gustafson C, Rasmussen M, Cappellini E, Olsen
JV, Szklarczyk D, Jensen LJ, Gilbert MTP et al. 2011. Pre-Clovis mastodon nunting 13,800
years ago at the Manis site, Washington. Science 334:351-352.

-------------------

A fisherman inadvertently dragged up one of the most significant pieces of evidence for the
existence of ancient inhabitants of North America prior to the Clovis people, who walked the
land some 15,000 years ago. A small wooden scallop trawler was dredging the seafloor off the
coastline of Chesapeake Bay, when he hit a snag. When he pulled up his net, he found a
22,000-year-old mastodon skull and a flaked blade made of a volcanic rock called rhyolite. A
report in Live Science says that the combination of the finds may suggest that people lived in
North America, and possibly butchered the mastodon, thousands of years before people from
the Clovis culture, who are widely thought to be the first settlers of North America and the
ancestors of all living Native Americans.

Most researchers believe the first Americans crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia about
15,000 years ago and quickly colonized North America. Artifacts from these ancient settlers,
who have been named the Clovis culture after one of the archaeological sites in Clovis, New
Mexico, have been found from Canada to the edges of North America. However, a number of
discoveries in recent years have challenged the view that the Clovis were the first, and to date,
no archaeological evidence of human settlements has ever been found in the Beringian land
bridge.

The mastodon and stone tool finding further supports the perspective that there were other
inhabitants of America that preceded the Clovis. The ancient fossil and tool were first hauled
off the seafloor in 1974, and were donated to Gwynn's Island Museum in Virginia, where they
sat unnoticed for four decades. However, scientists have now realised the significance of the
items after Dennis Stanford, an archaeologist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C., carried out radiocarbon dating on the mastodon tusk and found it was more than 22,000
years old. While the stone tool cannot be dated, the characteristics of the artifact suggest it is
also of the same age.

Both pieces show characteristic weathering that indicated they were exposed to the air for a
while and then submerged in a saltwater marsh, before finally being buried in seawater,
possible at the same time. Furthermore, the flint-knapping technique used to make it was
similar to that found in Solutrean tools, which were made in Europe between 22,000 and
17,000 years ago. Taken together, the discovery gives credence to the Solutrean hypothesis,
which proposes that the first inhabitants arrived by sea from southwest Europe millennia
earlier than the Clovis.
 Microstriations and wear shown are typical of tool use. The sharp crisp edges suggest it
wasn't tumbled in the surf or carried by water. The wear on the tool suggests it was on dry
land at some point and then buried by sea water, which means the tool was older than 14,000
years old. Credit: Dennis Stanford

"I think it's very convincing," said Michael B. Collins, an anthropologist at Texas State
University in San Marcos, Texas, who was not involved in the current work. The weathering
on both items first with open air, then saltwater, then seawater exposure would be
almost impossible to get without them having been on land prior to rising sea levels, Collins
explained.

While this discovery adds one more piece to a very large puzzle, the debate regarding the first
inhabitants of the Americas is far from over.

Featured image: Left: The flaked blade. Right: The mastodon teeth. Credit: Dennis Stanford

Read more: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/evidence-pre-

clovis-inhabitants-americas-emerges-sea-floor-001961#ixzz3ovIBmBob
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------------------------------------------------------------------

The remains of a young boy, ceremonially buried some 12,600 years ago in Montana, have
revealed the ancestry of one of the earliest populations in the Americas, known as the Clovis
culture.

Published in this issue of Nature, the boys genome sequence shows that todays indigenous
groups spanning North and South America are all descended from a single population that
trekked across the Bering land bridge from Asia (M. Rasmussen et al. Nature 506, 225229;
2014). The analysis also points to an early split between the ancestors of the Clovis people
and a second group, whose DNA lives on in populations in Canada and Greenland (see
page 162).

But the research underscores the ethical minefield of studying ancient Native American
remains, and rekindles memories of a bruising legal fight over a different human skeleton in
the 1990s.

To avoid such a controversy, Eske Willerslev, a palaeobiologist at the University of

Copenhagen who led the latest study, attempted to involve Native American communities.
And so he embarked on a tour of Montanas Indian reservations last year, talking to
community members to explain his work and seek their support. I didnt want a situation
where the first time they heard about this study was when its published, he says.
Source: Montana Office of Public Instruction

Expand

Construction workers discovered the Clovis burial site on a private ranch near the small town
of Wilsall in May 1968 (see Ancient origins). About 100 stone and bone artefacts, as well as
bone fragments from a male child aged under two, were subsequently recovered.

The boys bones were found to date to the end of the Clovis culture, which flourished in the
central and western United States between about 13,000 and 12,600 years ago. Carved elk
bones found with the boys remains were hundreds of years older, suggesting that they were
heirlooms. The ranch, owned by Melvyn and Helen Anzick, is the only site yet discovered at
which Clovis objects exist alongside human bones. Most of the artefacts now reside in a
museum, but researchers returned the human remains to the Anzick family in the late 1990s.

At that time, the Anzicks daughter, Sarah, was conducting cancer and genome research at the
National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and thought about sequencing genetic
material from the bones. But she was wary of stoking a similar debate to the one surrounding
Kennewick Man, a human skeleton found on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick,
Washington, in July 1996. Its discovery sparked an eight-year legal battle between Native
American tribes, who claimed that they were culturally connected to the individual, and
researchers, who said that the roughly 9,000-year-old remains pre-dated the tribes.

The US government sided with the tribes, citing the federal Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The act requires that human remains discovered
on federal lands as Kennewick Man was are returned to affiliated tribes for reburial. But
a court ruled that the law did not apply, largely because of the age of the remains, and ordered
that Kennewick Man be stored away from public view in a museum.

Sarah Anzick sought the advice of local tribes over the Clovis boy, but she could not reach a
consensus with the tribes on what to do. She gave up on the idea, stored the bones in a safe
location and got on with her other research.
In 2009, archaeologist Michael Waters, of Texas A&M University in College Station,
contacted Anzick with the idea of sending the remains to Willerslevs lab. (In early 2010, the
lab published one of the first genome sequences of an ancient human, a 4,000-year-old
resident of Greenland; see M. Rasmussen et al. Nature 463, 757762; 2010.) I said, I will
allow you guys to do this, but I want to be involved, recalls Anzick, who has published
more than a dozen papers in leading journals.

In Copenhagen, she extracted DNA from fragments of the boys skull ready for mitochondrial
genome sequencing, which offers a snapshot of a persons maternal ancestry. Back in
Montana months later, she received the sequencing data and discovered that the genomes
closest match was to present-day Native Americans. My heart just stopped, she says.

http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-genome-stirs-ethics-debate-1.14698