Did the First Americans Hunt Mammoths or Did They Just Scavenge Them?

Early Americans may have spread through the continents by targeting Ice Age giants, but not experts are convinced.

To spread across the Americas, some of the first people to settle the continents may have followed the big game.

A new study argues that early Native American ancestors expanded from Alaska to South America by focusing on enormous Ice Age herbivores—mammoths, gomphotheres, and giant ground sloths. But a separate paper warns that the evidence still cannot prove whether Clovis people hunted many of those animals or scavenged their carcasses.

Were mammoths and other giants regular prey for the first Americans, or were some carcasses simply too good to pass up?

Giants on the Menu

In the Science Advances study, Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, James Chatters of McMaster University, and colleagues examined animal bones and tools from 50 archaeological sites across the Americas. They compared three early traditions: Eastern Beringians in Alaska and Yukon, Clovis people in North America, and Fishtail Projectile Point groups in South America.

The team tracked whether these people ate broadly from whatever each landscape offered or targeted a narrow set of large animals.

“One of two competing ideas is dietary generalization: exploiting a wide variety of resources that would differ based on region,” Potter said in a statement. “The other is megafaunal specialization: focusing on just a few large-bodied prey.”

The researchers concluded that huge herbivores supplied most of the food. In their models, megaherbivores—plant-eaters over 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds)—made up roughly 83 to 88% of edible biomass in the three regions. Mammoths dominated in Beringia and Clovis North America while giant ground sloths and gomphotheres loomed larger in South America.

These huge animals were not necessarily a common encounter in Ice Age landscapes. Rabbits, rodents, and other small animals would have been far easier to find. Yet their bones barely appeared at many known ancient campsites and caves used by the earliest settlers of the Americas.

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“The test of dietary specialization isn’t just how many of a given animal you find at an ancient campsite,” Potter added. “It’s what the record looks like relative to natural abundance.”

Big Game Tools

The Science Advances study authors say that hunting large animals can explain the fast rate at which humans were able to spread across the American continents.

A group entering a new land usually has to learn local plants, streams, migration routes, and small-game habits. But mammoths and other giants ranged widely. If hunters already knew how to track and butcher them in their home turf, they could carry that knowledge across unfamiliar territories.

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“We have shown through our analysis of food resources, mobility, and technology that this strategy made the most sense (in terms of energetic cost-benefits) for small groups of hunter-gatherers in unfamiliar landscapes,” Potter told IFLScience.

Tools add another important clue. Large fluted projectile points and butchering implements were found from that era, with little evidence for fishing gear or plant-processing tools.

And perhaps most crucially of all, the timing of human arrival coincides suspiciously with a rolling pattern of extinction. Mammoths and horses vanished in Alaska around 13,300 years ago, North American Clovis-era megafauna disappeared by about 12,800 years ago, and some South American giants survived until about 11,600 years ago. This is why the authors argue that hunting, combined with climate stress, likely helped push vulnerable animals over the edge.

Not Routine Hunting?

A second study, in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, challenges the strongest version of that case. Metin Eren of Kent State University and colleagues reviewed 15 North American sites where Clovis points occur with mammoth, mastodon, or gomphothere remains. But they argue that archaeologists often call such places “kill sites” without proving a kill happened.

“We went through every site where we have Clovis [stone] points in association with proboscideans like mammoth and mastodon, and we cannot tell whether those animals were killed or already dead and then scavenged,” Eren told IFLScience.

The problem is equifinality: different behaviors can leave similar traces. Cut marks, stone tools, and scattered bones can result from hunters butchering fresh kills. But they can also result from people scavenging meat from animals that died earlier. The paper notes that no Clovis point has been found embedded in a North American proboscidean bone, a kind of direct evidence seen in some Eurasian contexts.

Eren’s team does not argue that Clovis people never hunted mammoths because that would be silly. But if people systematically tracked and killed such prey, the evidence should be much more robust than what we’ve got so far.

“If this were a trial for murder, Clovis murdering mammoths, we’d have to acquit,” Eren noted.

Potter rejected that view, calling Eren’s paper “a highly speculative and polemic piece … that is inconsistent with a wide array of data.” Eren, in turn, accused Potter’s team of misrepresenting previous work and relying on cherry-picked data.