Clovis points, it seems, were an American invention—perhaps the first American invention. More than 10,000 Clovis points have been discovered, scattered in 1,500 locations throughout most of North America; Clovis points, or something similar, have turned up as far south as Venezuela.
Carbon 14 dating at the Blackwater Draw site shows that the Clovis people lived in the area for about 600 years, hunting animals that drank at a spring-fed lake and marsh, building campfires, and even digging a well, the first known water control system in North America.
Clovis points are lance-shaped, partially fluted, and used for killing mammoths and other very large game (see Clovis complex).
Clovis and Folsom were hunting-and-gathering cultures; although both groups were fairly generalized foragers, Clovis people seemed to have preferred to eat Pleistocene megafauna such as mammoths, while Folsom people seem to have preferred an extinct species of giant bison.
So how did people first come to the Americas? Archaeologists think the first Americans probably crossed from Siberia into North America. Some people may have walked across the Bering Land Bridge. The Bering Land Bridge was a wide strip of land that connected Siberia and North America during the Ice Age.
The Clovis culture takes its name from the town in New Mexico, where the striking stone projectile point characteristic of the tradition was first found. It's distinctive characteristics include a central groove, or flute, along both of its faces and finely worked edges.
Perhaps the most famous absolute dating technique, radiocarbon dating was developed during the 1940s and relies on chemistry to determine the ages of objects. Used on organic matter, the technique measures the amount of radioactive carbon decay to determine an object's age.
In Brief. For decades archaeologists thought the first Americans were the Clovis people, who were said to have reached the New World some 13,000 years ago from northern Asia. But fresh archaeological finds have established that humans reached the Americas thousands of years before that.
Na-Dené-speaking peoples entered North America starting around 8000 BCE, reaching the Pacific Northwest by 5000 BCE, and from there migrating along the Pacific Coast and into the interior.
Folsom groups, also called Folsom peoples or Folsom culture, occupied all of Colorado between about 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. They were not the first people in these areas, although they might have been the first in some newly unglaciated portions of the high Rockies.
ABSTRACT. Clovis technology is argued to possess distinctive attributes that make a stone tool assemblage recognizable as Clovis, even absent its hallmark fluted projectile points, or radiometric ages that place the assemblage in the late Pleistocene.
But the discovery of earlier, pre-Clovis sites — including a nearly 15,000-year-old settlement called Monte Verde in southern Chile and the 14,000-year-old Paisley Caves in Oregon — challenged the theory that Clovis people were the first to reach the Americas.
