Early Montanans were avid mammoth hunters, research shows

BILLINGS – Roughly 13,000 years ago, the burly scimitar cat with its hyena-like build and large canine teeth specialized in killing large mammals in cold climates, including young mammoths in North America.

Adult mammoths were not easy prey, weighing as much as a school bus, with tusks that could reach 13 feet. Yet a recently published study revealed the mother of a child buried during the Ice Age on the western edge of the Crazy Mountains in Montana obtained about 40% of her nutrition from mammoth meat.

“That’s quite a bit considering that mammoths would not have been common,” said Todd Surovell, director of the Frison Institute at the University of Wyoming’s Anthropology Department. “It suggests that people may have specifically targeted these animals.”

Surovell was not involved in the research.

“This is the first direct evidence of Clovis diet, which has previously been estimated from indirect evidence like the remains of food animals in kill and camp sites, and from the toolkit and movement patterns of the Clovis people,” wrote Jim Chatters, lead author of the study and owner of the forensics science consulting firm Applied Paleoscience, in an email.

The study, titled “Mammoth featured heavily in Western Clovis diet” was published in the journal “Science Advances” on Dec. 4. Other researchers involved in the work include: Ben Potter, Stuart Fiedel, Juliet Morrow, Christopher Jass and Matthew Wooller.

Anzick child

The remains of the ancient 18-month-old male child, who was the subject of the study, was accidentally unearthed near Wilsall in 1968. He was buried with an incredible array of specialized stone tools and the site was ceremoniously covered with powdered red ochre. The youth was named the Anzick child, after the property’s owners.

The tools are a collection of bifaces, projectile points and antlers classified by archaeologists as Clovis culture artifacts, named after where they were first unearthed in the 1920s near Clovis, New Mexico. Researchers refer to the artifacts found with the Anzick child as a “hunting toolkit directed primarily at megafauna.”

The Anzick child’s relatives arrived in North America about 15,000 years ago, roaming south of large ice sheets that still cloaked Canada. Clovis people fashioned their stone spear tips in a distinctive fashion, with grooved, or fluted, bases for attachment to spears or darts thrown with a lever, called an atlatl.

How

Using previously published information from analysis of the Anzick child, Chatters and his colleagues were able to take the chemical composition of the youngster’s bones and compare it with “other animals that shared the ecosystem of the Northwestern Great Plains,” Chatters said.

“The elements carbon and nitrogen form a large part of proteins, which make up a large part of bones,” he said. “Each of those elements has two stable forms, which differ only in the number of neutrons in the atom’s nucleus. The relative proportions of those isotopes vary among plants and therefore among the animals that eat them. In turn, the predators of plant eating animals themselves take up the isotopic composition of their prey.

“Because the child was likely getting most of his food as mother’s milk, we converted the isotopic composition of the child’s bone (which had been measured about a decade ago) to the values found in his mother’s tissues,” Chatters said.

As a result of the analysis, the researchers assumed the child was getting two-thirds of its sustenance from nursing with the other third from solid foods.

The other main nutrient sources identified by the research included elk (15%), bison and a now extinct species of camel (21%), which couldn’t be distinguished from each other.

Another 4% to 9% was identified as an ancient species of horse. It’s possible, the researchers wrote, that the horse and camel were regionally extirpated by the later part of the Clovis era, about the same time elk arrived.

The analysis also prompted the researchers to infer the Anzick child’s relatives were eating few plants, nuts or seeds. In addition, they examined Ice Age fossil remains of small mammals found in Wyoming’s Natural Trap Cave to rule them out as a common food source.

“I think it’s an incredible discovery and another astounding revelation about who Clovis people were and what they did,” said Shane Doyle, of the Crow Tribe, who helped with the ceremonial intertribal reburial of the child’s remains in 2014. “Many questions still remain about Clovis people and their true impact on their ecological niche, but I think these new research advancements will help us gain a lot more insight in the years to come.”

Montana state archaeologist Patrick Rennie was surprised by the finding, saying he would have expected a more broad-based diet, but he was excited by the possibility of similar research.

“The potential for expanding our understanding of precontact diets everywhere is unprecedented,” he said.

A time of megafauna

The elephant-like mammoth is believed to have disappeared from North America about 12,000 years ago. Theories on the large creature’s extinction vary from climate change to hunting pressure by humans, or a combination of the two. Mammoths were slow to reproduce, which also would have made it more difficult for them to survive ecological and environmental changes, especially if their young were being targeted.

Mammoths weren’t the only large animals, called megafauna, that disappeared around the same time. Giant sloths, weighing more than 3,000 pounds, short-faced bears and the dire wolf also could have been competitors and prey for the early Americans. Even furry camels, called camelops, were present, standing up to 7 feet tall at the shoulder and weighing up to 1,800 pounds. Bringing down such large animals would have been dangerous, requiring great skill by hunters with what are considered crude weapons by today’s standards. Yet the reward in food would have made killing them worth the risk.

“I tend to think that like most hunters today, most of the interpretations of early hunting has focused too much on aspects of the weapons and not enough on the very in-depth, multigeneration information/understanding of the prey behaviors and ecology,” said Larry Todd, a Colorado archaeologist who has focused much of his career on analysis of early bison hunters, in an email. “If you understand the prey animal enough and its responses to a wide range of conditions (weather, vegetation, light, etc.) then you should be able to select how to employ almost any weaponry effectively.”

Based on the information he’s studied, Todd sees the earliest Americans as specialists at big-game hunting rather than being “more generalized foragers like most later peoples.”

Hunted to extinction?

Surovell said he was hesitant to use one data point to assume that humans may have been responsible for mammoth extinction, but added if that were the case researchers would see a “dietary signature” like the Anzick child’s.

Doyle was similarly uncomfortable with blaming mammoth extinction on humans based on the study, but added the research shows the original Americans undoubtedly used mammoth as a primary food source. “I think we can be sure of that now,” he said.

Chatters said his crew conducted the research “to contribute to solution of a debate about Clovis subsistence practices. One side of the argument states Clovis folk could only have survived on a generalized diet of large and small animals and plants, whereas the other points to the archaeological evidence to say that they were most likely big game hunters. The fact that the known only emissary from that culture, the 18-month-old boy from Anzick, lived on protein derived 95% from the largest animals in the landscape – megafauna – supports the big game hunter conclusion.”

The researchers noted, “The loss of this taxon (mammoth) may have played a role in behavioral shifts and the end of Clovis as a distinct cultural tradition in the Americas.”