Clovis People Used Bones Of Small Predators For Needles

The Clovis people (who are not the first indigenous American culture, although they are derived from the Founding population of the Americas whose main wave of expansion came about fifteen hundred years earlier) are known for the spears that they used to hunt big game in North America before the Younger Dryas event wiped out their culture. But to survive in North America, they also needed needles to make clothing so they could function in this relatively cool region.

Tiny artifacts unearthed at a Wyoming site where a mammoth was butchered 13,000 years ago are revealing intriguing details about how the earliest Americans survived the last ice age.

Archaeologists found 32 needle fragments made from animal bone buried almost 15 feet (nearly 5 meters) underground at the La Prele site in Converse County. They are not the earliest eyed needles in the archaeological record, but for the first time scientists have been able to identify what the needles were made of by analyzing protein information contained in the bone collagen. The results were not what they expected.

“We had assumed they would be made out of bison or mammoth bone, which comprise most of the animal bones found at La Prele and other sites of its age in the High Plains and Rocky Mountains of North America,” said Wyoming state archaeologist Spencer Pelton, lead author of a new study on the needles published November 27 in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

Instead, the needles were created from the bones of red foxes, bobcats, mountain lions, lynx, the now-extinct American cheetah, and hares or rabbits, the study found.

“It was extremely surprising that these needles were made out of small carnivores,” Pelton said.

From CNN.