Direct proof that the first Americans based their diet on the mammoth

Dec. 5 () –

Scientists have discovered the first direct evidence that ancient Americans depended primarily on mammoths and other large animals for food.

Their research sheds new light on the rapid expansion of humans across the Americas and the extinction of large ice age mammals.

The study, published in the journal Science Advancesused the stable isotope analysis to model the diet of the mother of a baby discovered in a 13,000-year-old Clovis cemetery in Montana. Before this study, prehistoric diet was inferred by analyzing secondary evidence, such as stone tools or the preserved remains of prey animals.

The findings support the hypothesis that the Clovis They specialized in hunting large animals instead of looking primarily for smaller animals and plants.

The Clovis inhabited North America about 13,000 years ago. During that time period, animals such as mammoths lived in both northern Asia and the Americas. Mammoths migrated long distances, making them a reliable resource, rich in fat and protein, for highly mobile humans.

“The focus on mammoths helps explain how the Clovis people were able to spread across North and South America in just a few hundred years,” he said. in a statement co-senior author James Chatters of McMaster University.

“What surprises me is that this confirms a lot of data from other sites. For example, the animal parts left at the Clovis sites are dominated by megafaunaand the projectile tips are large, attached to darts, which were efficient ranged weapons,” said co-senior author Ben Potter, a professor of archeology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Hunting mammoths provided a flexible way of life, Potter said. It allowed the Clovis people to move to new areas without having to rely on smaller, localized animals, which could vary significantly from region to region.

“This mobility aligns with what we see in Clovis technology and settlement patterns,” Potter said. “They were very mobile. “They transported resources such as tool stones over hundreds of kilometers.”

The researchers were able to model the Clovis diet by first analyzing isotopic data published during previous studies by other researchers on the remains of Anzick-1, an 18-month-old Clovis child. By adjusting for breastfeeding, they were able to estimate the values ​​of their mother’s diet.

“Isotopes provide a chemical fingerprint of a consumer’s diet and can be compared to those of potential dietary elements to estimate the proportional contribution of different dietary elements,” said Mat Wooller, author of the study and director of the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility at UAF.

The team compared the stable isotopic signature of the mother with those of a wide variety of food sources from the same time period and region. They found that Approximately 40% of their diet came from mammoths, and other large animals such as elk and bison completed the rest. Small mammals, sometimes thought to have been an important source of food, played a very minor role in their diet.

Finally, the scientists compared the mother’s diet with that of other omnivores and carnivores from the same period, including American lions, bears and wolves. The mother’s diet was very similar to that of the scimitar cat, a mammoth specialist.

The findings also suggest that early humans may have contributed to the extinction of large Ice Age animals, especially as environmental changes reduced their habitats.

“If the climate is changing in a way that reduces suitable habitat for some of this megafauna, then it potentially makes them more susceptible to human predation. These people were very effective hunters“Potter said.

“We had the combination of a highly sophisticated hunting culture – with skills honed over more than 10,000 years in Eurasia – taking on naive populations of megafauna under environmental stress,” Chatters said.