Elephants or Mammoths in Native American Art

Paleoindians coexisted with mammoths, and hunted them until (for reasons still unknown) these gigantic hairy elephant-looking creatures died out some 10,000 years ago. Mammoths managed to survive a bit longer in the Wrangel Island on the north coast of Northeastern Siberia, very close to Bering Strait (see map) until around 3,700 years ago (Source) 800 years after the great pyramid of Cheops was built in Egypt. And these Wrangel creatures are said to be the last mammoths on earht.

Ingram and "elephants" in the 1560s

In a previous post mentioned the account of David Ingram, who said he had seen elephants while he walked all the way from Mexico to Nova Scotia, Canada, as a marooned sailor in the 1560s, and wondered if what he saw was a group of surviving mammoths, creatures unknown to Ingram, but elephant-like.

What do we know about the interactions of humans and mammoths in the Americas? Could they have survived until the sixteenth century?

Mound-builder and Elephants or Mammoths

While reading about mounds and mound-builders, I came across some interesting images in old, late 1800s publications, depicting an elephant or mammoth-like creature. Below are two images from that period, depicting objects that were discovered inside mounds in North America.

The first report was published in 1883, in Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley, by Henry W. Henshaw. It has some interesting text about a mound shaped like an elephant! See the image below.

Elephant Mound, Grand County, Wisconsin. Fig. 27 in Henshaw's book

The author is skeptical that the mound actually represents a mammoth, I will quote him in full:

"THE "ELEPHANT" MOUND.
By far the most important of the animal mounds, from the nature of the deductions it has given rise to, is the so-called "Elephant Mound," of Wisconsin.
By its discovery and description the interesting question was raised as to the contemporaneousness of the Mound-Builder and the mastodon, an interest which is likely to be further enhanced by the more recent bringing to light in Iowa of two pipes carved in the semblance of the same animal, as well as a tablet showing two figures asserted by some archæologists to have been intended for the same animal.
Although both the mound and pipes have been referred in turn to the peccary, the tapir, and the armadillo, it is safe to exclude these animals from consideration. It is indeed perhaps more likely that the ancient inhabitants of the Upper Mississippi Valley were autoptically acquainted with the mastodon than with either of the above-named animals, owing to their southern habitat.
Referring to the possibility that the mastodon was known to the Mound-Builders, it is impossible to fix with any degree of precision the time of its disappearance from among living animals. Mastodon bones have been exhumed from peat beds in this country at a depth which, so far as is proved by the rate of deposition, implies that the animal may have been alive within five hundred years. The extinction of the mastodon, geologically speaking, was certainly a very recent event, and, as an antiquity of upwards of a thousand or more years has been assigned to some of the mounds, it is entirely within the possibilities that this animal was living at the time these were thrown up, granting even that the time of their erection has been overestimated. It must be admitted, therefore, that there are no inherent absurdities in the belief that the Mound-Builders were acquainted with the mastodon. Granting that they may have been acquainted with the animal, the question arises, what proof is there that they actually were? The answer to this question made by certain archæologists is—the Elephant Mound, of Wisconsin.
Recalling the fact that among the animal mounds many nondescript shapes occur which cannot be identified at all, and as many others which have been called after the animals they appear to most nearly resemble, carry out their peculiarities only in the most vague and [Pg 154] general way, it is a little difficult to understand the confidence with which this effigy has been asserted to represent the mastodon; for the mound (a copy of which as figured in the Smithsonian Annual Report for 1872 is here given) can by no means be said to closely represent the shape, proportions, and peculiarities of the animal whose name it bears. In fact, it is true of this, as of so many other of the effigies, the identity of which must be guessed, that the resemblance is of the most vague and general kind, the figure simulating the elephant no more closely than any one of a score or more mounds in Wisconsin, except in one important particular, viz, the head has a prolongation or snout-like appendage, which is its chief, in fact its only real, elephantine character. If this appendage is too long for the snout of any other known animal, it is certainly too short for the trunk of a mastodon. Still, so far as this one character goes, it is doubtless true that it is more suggestive of the mastodon than of any other animal. No hint is afforded of tusks, ears, or tail, and were it not for the snout the animal effigy might readily be called a bear, it nearly resembling in its general make-up many of the so-called bear mounds figured by Squier and Davis from this same county in Wisconsin. The latter, too, are of the same gigantic size and proportions.
If it can safely be assumed that an animal effigy without tusks, without ears, and without a tail was really intended to represent a mastodon, it would be stretching imagination but a step farther to call all the large-bodied, heavy-limbed animal effigies hitherto named bears, mastodons, attributing the lack of trunks, as well as ears, tusks, and tails, to inattention to slight details on the part of the mound artist.
It is true that one bit of good, positive proof is worth many of a negative character. But here the one positive resemblance, the trunk of the supposed elephant, falls far short of an exact imitation, and, as the other features necessary to a good likeness of a mastodon are wholly wanting, is not this an instance where the negative proof should be held sufficient to largely outweigh the positive?"

The Elephant Pipes

The same author mentions "pipes": "As regards likeness to the mastodon, the pipes before alluded to, copies of which as given in Barber's articles on Mound Pipes in American Naturalist for April, 1882, Figs. 17 and 18, are here presented, while not entirely above criticism, are much nearer what they have been supposed to be than the mound just mentioned." See the image below.

Elephant pipes from Iowa. Figs. 28 & 29 in Henshaw's book

Henshaw points out that neither pipe has tusks, and ivory tusks of mammoths would have been noticed by the natives, who used it for many different purposes. They also lack tails. He also notes that the origin of the pipes is suspicious:

"As the manner of discovery of such relics always forms an important part of their history, the following account of the pipes as communicated to Mr. Barber by Mr. W. H. Pratt, president of the Davenport Academy (American Naturalist for April, 1882, pp. 275, 276), is here subjoined:

The first elephant pipe, which we obtained (Fig. 17) a little more than a year ago, was found some six years before by an illiterate German farmer named Peter Mare, while planting corn on a farm in the mound region, Louisa County, Iowa. He did not care whether it was elephant or kangaroo; to him it was a curious 'Indian stone,' and nothing more, and he kept it and smoked it. In 1878 he removed to Kansas, and when he left he gave the pipe to his brother-in-law, a farm laborer, who also smoked it. Mr. Gass happened to hear of it, as he is always inquiring about such things, hunted up the man and borrowed the pipe to take photographs and casts from it. He could not buy it. The man said his brother-in-law gave it to him and as it was a curious thing—he wanted to keep it. We were, however, unfortunate, or fortunate, [Pg 157]enough to break it; that spoiled it for him and that was his chance to make some money out of it. He could have claimed any amount, and we would, as in duty bound, have raised it for him, but he was satisfied with three or four dollars. During the first week in April, this month, Rev. Ad. Blumer, another German Lutheran minister, now of Genesee, Illinois, having formerly resided in Louisa County, went down there in company with Mr. Gass to open a few mounds, Mr. Blumer being well acquainted there. They carefully explored ten of them, and found nothing but ashes and decayed bones in any, except one. In that one was a layer of red, hard-burned clay, about five feet across and thirteen inches in thickness at the center, which rested upon a bed of ashes one foot in depth in the middle, the ashes resting upon the natural undisturbed clay. In the ashes, near the bottom of the layer, they found a part of a broken carved stone pipe, representing some bird; a very small beautifully formed copper 'axe,' and this last elephant pipe (Fig. 18). This pipe was first discovered by Mr. Blumer, and by him, at our earnest solicitation, turned over to the Academy.

It will be seen from the above that the same gentleman was instrumental in bringing to light the two specimens constituting the present supply of elephant pipes."

Another Account about the Elephant Pipes

The book "The mound builders; their work and relics" by Stephen D. Peet, published in 1892 shows another image of the "elephant" pipe of Fig. 29, it can be seen as Fig. 15 on page 13. and the story of its discovery is given, as follows; notice that Peed does not doubt that the pipes are genuine: "In the Davenport Academy there are two pipes made in imitation of the elephant or mastodon. One of these pipes is said to have been taken out from the depths of a mound in Louisa County, Iowa. A German clergyman, Rev. A. Blumer, having first discovered it, handed it to Rev. J. E. Gass, his companion in exploration. It is unreasonable to doubt the genuineness of this find, even if the re markable discoveries which were made by the latter gentleman have been discredited. A second elephant pipe (Fig. 13), which had been discovered in a corn-field by a German farmer by the name of Myers, after wards came into the hands of Mr. Gass."

On page 46 he provides more information: (highlight is mine):

"The third discovery is the one the most relied upon. This discovery was also made by the Rev. Mr. Gass, in the spring of 1880, several years after the discovery of the tablets [more on the tablets below]. Mr. Gass was accompanied by Rev. Mr. Blcomer. A group of ten mounds, arranged in irregular rows, was situated along the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi bottoms west of Muscatine Slough [in Iowa, see Google map]. The first mound opened proved to be a sacrificial or cremation mound, situated on the extreme edge of a prominent bluff, having ravines on both sides. It was a flat cone, thirty feet in diameter, elevation three feet. Near the surface was a layer of hard clay, eighteen inches thick; below this a layer of burned red clay, as hard as brick, one foot thick; under this a bed of ashes, thirteen inches deep. In the ashes were found a portion of a carved stone pipe, bird form, by Mr. H. Haas; a very small copper axe by Mr. Gass ; a carved stone pipe, entire, representing an elephant, which, Mr, Bloomer says, "was first discovered by myself." The other mounds of the group were explored, and contained ashes and bones, but no relics. Mr. Gass makes no report of finding the elephant pipe, but leaves that to Mr. Bloomer. During the same year he discovered, in the mounds in Mercer County, Illinois, several Mound-builders pipes one representing a lizard, one a turtle, another a snake coiled around an upright cylinder and covered with some very thin metallic coating. Mounds on the Illlinois side, near Moline, and Copper Creek and Pine Creek, had previously yielded to Mr. Gass carved stone pipes, one of them representing a porcupine, anothera howling wolf. The pipes were composed of some dark-colored slate or variety of talc, thus showing that the Mound-builders of the region were in the habit of imitating the animals which they saw, making effigies of them on their pipes."

The pipe shown in Henshaw's Fig. 28 is reproduced here too, as Fig. 17 on page 41, it is the one discovered by Myers in a corn field. Peet points out (p. 47) that the pipes lack tusks because they would be difficult to carve, and if carved, they would have broken off easily.

Peet and the Elephant Mound

Peet also mentions the elephant mound in Chapter III, with the same image posted further up. He escribes how the "Elephant Mound" was discovered, and surveyed by Jared Warner in 1874, accompanied by J.C. Orr and J.C. Scott. It was located near Wyalusing, close to the Mississippi River. It was Warner who drew the image shown further up. Peet was not convinced that it was actually an elephant, probably a bear (see page 42): "'The head is large, and the proportion of the whole so symmetrical that the mound well deserves the name. The mound was in a shallow valley between two sandy ridges, and was only about eight feet above high water.' There are many mounds in this section of country in the shape of birds, bears, deer and foxes. We would say that the effigy of the bear, which is very common here, and which was the totem of the clan formerly dwelling here, has exactly the same shape as the so-called elephant, but is not so large and lacks the proboscis. The projection at the nose called the proboscis is not really one, but is the result of the washing of the soil. It was a mere prolongation of the head, had no curve, did not even reach so far as the feet, and can be called a proboscis only by a stretch of imagination."

The Davenport Tablets

Interestingly, Peet mentions that Gass also unearthed tablets with inscriptions on them, dug from mounds! These, Peet deems to be fake, and I agree with him. See the images below (p. 44-45), which transcribe the "text" found on the tablets:

Rev. Gass explored some mounds near the city of Davenport, Iowa (map), on the bank of the Mississippi River in 1874. In Mound number three, he discovered the tablets. The mound contained two graves, and was excavated in 1877. Gass, accompanied by seven men, two of which were students dug and close to the bottom, they found two tablets, with inscriptions.

This finding is surely a fraud, not one committed by Gass, but by another person (or more than one person), who planted them in the mound for him to find. The tablets deserve their own post, which I will publish shortly.

Mammoths and Paleoindian Rock Art

We do know now that mammoths were depicted in rock art, and they have been discovered in different parts of America by serious researchers. For instance, in Bluff, Utah, US, according to Malotki and Wallace, 2011, there are mammoth images that are ~11 to 13,000 years old.

Purdy et al., 2009 reported an engraving depicting a mammoth, on mammoth ivory, 13 kya, found at Vero Beach, Florida. This is the first, and only one found in America (in Europe, there are plenty of them), and the oldest artistic object in America. It is pictured below (Source)

Further afield, in the Amazon region of Serranía de la Lindosa, Colombia, in South America, Iriarte et al., 2022 have identified rock paintings that depict megafaunal animals, including proboscideans (Gomphotheriidae) and dated to 12.6 kya. See it below:

(a) Gomphothere painting at La Lindosa: 1. proboscis; 2. fingers; 3. flared ears?; 4. moderately domed head. (b) Artistic reconstruction (Mike Keesey). Fig. 4 in Iriarte et al., 2022

Holly Oak Mammoth Pendant: Far too recent

This controversial object was discovered in 1864 by Hilborne T. Cresson, who worked at Harvard's Peabody Museum as an assistant in the archaeology section and W.L. Suralt. Cresson came forward in 1889 announcing that he found it near Holly Oak railway depot in Delaware, US, in a layer of peat. It is incised on the shell of a marine snail (Busycon sinistrum), and depicts a woolly mammoth.

It was considered to be a fake, as it looked very similar to an engraving discovered in France a few years earlier. However, it was reassesed in 1976 in an article published in Science (making its cover, see image below) authored by John C. Kraft and Ronald A. Thomas, they found that the "carvings appear to be aged in asimilar manner to the remainder of the shell."

This meant that it wasn't an old shell recently incised as a hoax! The authors even suggested it could be as old as 40,000 years based on the age of the sediments at Holly Oak.

But the controversy lingers on. A few years later, Griffin et al., 1988 dated the shell to 1,500 years BP, and discarded it as a hoax because the authors stated that there were no mammoths alive in America at that time.

Contemporary Mammoths

This leads me to ask: Isn't the 1500-year-old pendant proof that someone saw and depicted a mammoth at that time? And is proof of its existence? Isn't science built on evidence like this? or, is it based on preconceptions like "mammoths died 4000 years ago and that is final".

This brings me back to David Ingram, who claimed seeing "elephants" in the 1560s. So, why couldn't there have been a pocket of extant mammoths in Delaware in 500 AD? They were seen and depicted as an incised image on a shell.

There are some Native American myths about mammoth-like creatures (Jandác̃ek, 2018) like the "Stiff-Legged Bear - Katci-to-wαck'w... it has skin, which is Pachyderm, resistant to arrows. It is believed by many experts, e.g. Strong (1934:81) to be based on the mammoth and the mastodon" Citing: Strong, W. D. (1934). North American traditions suggesting a knowledge of a mammoth. American Anthropologist, 36, 81. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1934.36.1.02a00060 🔒

I found another source quoting Strong "Naskapi, an Algonquin tribe living in Labrador at the time, speaks of a monster with large, round footprints, "a big head, large ears and teeth, and a long nose" and was very large overall. These characteristics could not be solely observed from fossilized remains, indicating that a prehistoric memory persists and is contained in this oral narrative - making it a myth of historical traditions" (the natives actually saw the mammoths!)

Other sources mention that the Salish of British Columbia have a mammoth song and a mammoth dance. The Osage people describe sloths, giant bears, dire wolves and mammoths battling each other (See: O'Donnell, J. (2024). Fountain Creek: Big Lessons from a Little River. United States: Torrey House Press). However, authors like Mayor, 2007 while mentioning mammoth myths among Delaware and Shawnee natives considers these, and the Osage "monster battle" myth as constructions built when the natives came across fossil bones of megafaunal animals. They were not contemporaries, they just happened to find fossil bones.

Less serious sources like this creationist one Mammoth Trapping in the Yukon: A review of Northern Tutchone oral history evidence supporting the survival of Woolly Mammoths in the Yukon Territory within the past 1,000 years by Johnson, 2019, published with the intention of promoting the Creationist pseudoscientific viewpoint, offer an insight into other native myths (leaving aside creationism), and the recent survival of mammoths in northern North America.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

30 ky old bone tool from Tule Springs (a cover-up?)

In my recent post about Clovis First, I mentioned that Vance Haynes had assumed the role of publication gatekeeper and watchdogs to prevent anti-Clovis-First scholars from publishing research that could undermine that theory. I have found some threads in X (twitter) and in forums mentioning conspiracy theories about scientists damaging proof of pre-Clovis sites, but I am not convinced yet, that those allegations are true. What I do know for certain is that Vance Haynes did not believe in an early peopling of America. Today's post looks into a finding that he seems to have ignored due to its old age, because he discarded it, considering it far too old to fit into his neat Clovis First hypothesis!

Below is the quote from the following source: National Park Service (NPS) History Collection, NPS Paleontology Program Records (HFCA 2465). Vincent Santucci’s NPS Oral History Project, 2016-2024. Vance Haynes. May 10, 2016. Interview conducted by Vincent Santucci et al. page 32. Accessed April 10, 2026. (VH is Vance Haynes, and KS is the interviewer):

Quote begins.

VH: To Dick's dying day there were a couple of bone things that were tools.
KS: Mhmm.
VH: In fact, he illustrates them. And because they were –they were polished they were spirally fractured and polished. But I, you know one of the things I pointed out was that if they get into the spring conduit—
KS: Right.
VH: —that's exactly what's going to happen to them
KS: Right.
VH: And it's also about this time that I got to know Hibberd who was this—
KS: Right.
VH: —famous paleontologist from Michigan.
KS: Right, right
VH: And Hibbard was working on these springs in Kansas and one of his springs was, this was a Pliocene spring you know.
KS: Mhmm.
VH: And it's just identical to what we were finding out here. And there were even some stone fragments in that thing that were polished. And they're not artifacts, they're Pliocene. So, it's a springs, it's very interesting what springs can do to make things look like artifacts. There's one I didn't put it in the report, because I always going to, write a little separate thing about it. Potential pre-Clovis artifacts from the spring conduit of Tule Springs. There is a, it's a part of a camel bone. I've forgotten which end of it is, but it's broken in such a way that it forms a perfect point. And exposed the inside.
KS: Mhmm.
VH: And it's beautifully braided on all sides, so it looks like a tool. But it came out of a 30,000- year-old conduit. So, there’s just. You can go through the art assemblages from there and pick but these assemblages that do look like tools."

Quote ends.

Context

Vance Haynes had taken part of the Big Dig at Tule Springs, near Las Vegas, Nevada, a National Monument (visit its official website). He unearthed many bones of extinct and extant animals, and of course, Clovis tools starting around 12 kya. Nothing earlier. This led Haynes to believe that the Clovis people were the first to reach the area. Earlier stuff was not even considered.

He seems to argue that Claude W. Hibbard (1905–1973) had found smilar artifacts in his studies in Kansas (maybe in Meade County). Dick, is Richard Shutler (1921-2007), and Vance implies that Dick believed the polished bones were indeed man made!

But Vance is terminant: "it looks like a tool. But it came out of a 30,000- year-old conduit", and added that "they're not artifacts, they're Pliocene" Their age, in his opinion did not allow him to consider them as tools!

Vance decided to defend the Clovis-First theory and published an article in which he states that the polished bones could be either 12-13 ky or 40 ky old, and guess what? He proves they were young, and fitted them into the Clovis theory: "Two bone objects from the Tule Springs site, possibly tools, occurred in ancient sedimentary fill of a small spring outlet-channel remnant. The ancient spring was active more than 40,000 years ago and again 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. The fill and the bone contained therein could be of either age. Chemical and X-ray analysis on bone of the known ages and bone from the fill showed no significant or systematic differences in fluorine, uranium, nitrogen, or phosphate content. On geological grounds, it is concluded that the bone objects are 12,000 to 13,000 years old." Case Closed, Clovis-First saved.

It is relevant to point out that a pre-Clovis age had been assigned to Tule Springs (Richard Shutler, 1965), but this was dismissed by Vance. Shutler had written that Pleistocene animals, burned earth, stone and bone tools had been radiocarbon dated to 23-28 kya at the site (Harrington and Simpson, 1961).

In The archaeology of archaeologists: "Camp Harrington" and the "Big Dig", Tule Springs, Nevada, 1962-1963, Swope, Murrell, and Aldi, report that "A small unifacial scraper was uncovered in a deposit containing camel bone fragments and organic deposits thought to be charcoal, and a sample from the deposit produced a date in excess of 28,000 BP (Fergusson and Libby 1964; Shutler 1967b). The results of Harrington’s subsequent excavations yielded but a single stone tool definitively linked to human activity and the radiocarbon date."

I wonder what happened to the "bone tools" are they in some box in a university?

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Pseudo-science Hancock and America's ancient "Lost Civilization"

I recently mentioned the Younger Dryas event that followed the end of the Last Ice Age, that had some significant impacts on the global environment causing cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, and warming in the Southern. It coincided with a critical moment some 12,000 years (12 kya) ago when humans were expanding across America, and filling in the final voids across Eurasia and Oceania. A few millennia later, agriculture would be discovered, and the shift from nomad hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers would take place, and shape the course of our history. Villages, writing, civilization would soon appear.

There have been different theories trying to explain the cause of the Younger Dryas event. I mentioned them in my post, the impact theory, though criticized, sounds interesting. Catastrophism is rejected by mainstream science due to philosophical reasons. Catastrophic events are unpredictable and cannot be explained by the deterministic methods of hard science. But sometimes a catastrophe takes place: One wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago (Mya). The Toba volcano's eruption 50-100 kya is another example. The Deccan Traps lava sheets 65 Mya are just some examples of them.

Hancock and the ancient pre-Dryas Civilization

But, when a wild hypothesis uses one of these events to justify a weird idea, that idea becomes pseudo-scientific. This is precisely what happens in Graham Hancock's book about a pre-Younger Dryas advanced civilization that spanned the world, and thrived tens of thousands of years ago. Hancock proposes that was exterminated by the meteor that provoked the Younger Dryas. (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization).

In his previous works Hancock describes this civilization as advanced, and its survivors taught primitive people the basics of civilization after the catastrophe.

These advanced people were "Caucasians" and they inspired the "bearded whit men" effigies found in South America (See his Fingerprints of the Gods), which smacks of racism. They also used their mental power to move objects and read minds (telekinesis and telepathy)!! This is almost like Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods from the late 1960s rebooted but using human instead of alien agencies! I have posted critically about "White Indians" and "Bearded men", finding them baseless theories with a hint of racial discrimination.

American native people were smart human beings. They built mounds and mounuments, they discovered agriculture and domesticated animals by themselves, they used script for records, and developed religions, and astronomy (for practical purposes like all civilizations). They developed artistic skills, worked metals and built water craft. We don't need to imagine any advanced civilization teaching them anything. There were no extinct ancient superhumans behind the mound-builders in the U.S. or the Amazonian natives, or common beliefs from these ancients that shaped religions. After all, the human mind is a common factor linking all cultures globally, and its repertoire is rather limited when it comes to religions —sun, moon, lighting, life after death, etc.

But piling speculation upon genuine facts, Hancock's book suggests that: "Recent scientific discoveries show that North America was first peopled at least 130,000 years ago... they are unexplained connections between the spiritual beliefs of the ancient Egyptians and the spiritual beliefs of the mound-builder cultures of North America's Mississippi Valley... The remains of hundreds of gigantic geometrical earthworks have recently been found in the Amazon jungle. They have unexplained resemblances to the equally grand and mysterious earthworks of Ohio, such as the Serpent Mound, and the Newark and High Bank Works, and to other geometrical and astronomical monuments as far afield as Stonhenge in England and Angkor in Cambodia"

Objections

I am no expert, and my blog has plenty of speculation, but I try to be realistic and base my speculation of facts and sound science. But in Hancok's book this is not the case.

Bringing together Stonehenge built 5,000 years ago, and Angkor Wat built 900 years ago, is ridiculous. They are two unrelated structures, one, is a roughly hewn megalithic set of stone circles with a few hundred gigantic rocks built during the Neolithic, the other a temple-citadel with galleries steeples, bass-reliefs and millions of sandstone blocks, by a modern nation contemporary with the Crusades in Europe. They could not be more different.

Regarding Egyptian and mound-builder religions and their similarities. We can only conjecture about the latter. The Egyptions left documents in writing, the mounds lack written evidence. We can only speculate about mounds and alignments pointing at stars, solstices and equinoxes. We know the Mayas had an advanced astronomy, so did the Chinese, does that make them similar to the Egyptians?

Mounds and Mound-builders

The Amazon earthworks are impressive (Watling et al., 2017):

"With ditches up to 11 m wide, 4 m deep, and 100–300 m in diameter, and with some sites having up to six enclosures, the geoglyphs of western Amazonia rival the most impressive examples of pre-Columbian monumental architecture anywhere in the Americas. Excavations of the geoglyphs have shown that they were built and used sporadically as ceremonial and public gathering sites between 2000 and 650 calibrated years before present (BP), but that some may have been constructed as early as 3500–3000 BP. Evidence for their ceremonial function is based on an almost complete absence of cultural material found within the enclosed areas, which suggests they were kept ritually “clean,” alongside their highly formalized architectural forms (mainly circles and squares)—features that distinguish the geoglyphs from similar ditched enclosures in northeast Bolivia. Surprisingly, little is known about who the geoglyph builders were and how and where they lived, as contemporary settlement sites have not yet been found in the region. It is thought that the geoglyph builders were a complex network of local, relatively autonomous groups connected by a shared and highly developed ideological system. Although some have proposed a connection between the geoglyphs and Arawak-speaking societies, the ceramics uncovered from these sites defy a close connection with Saladoid–Barrancoid styles normally associated with this language family, and instead present a complex mixture of distinct local traditions. Furthermore, it is likely that the geoglyphs were used and reused by different culture groups throughout their life spans."

They are a local, regional, trans-cultural phenomenon, unrelated to North American mounds of the U.S.

Serpent Mound was built ~1120 AD (Source) by a local Fort Ancient Culture, and the High Bank Earthworks, built by the local Hopewell Culture 1600 to 2000 years ago (AD 400-1000).

The Amazonian mounds of Colombia are far older. But, there are also more recent mounds, ditches, canals and causeways built between AD 400 and 1400 in the Bolivian savannah of Moxos (Prümers, et al., 2022). It is an area subject to seasonal flooding so the locals built ridges (camellones) to grow crops above the flood level, and channels to drain them. Semiurban, farmland not mounds with religious functionality. Then are the Ecuadorian Amazonian mounds (Rostain et al., 2024) are part of an agricultural society that flourished between 500 BC and 300 to 600 AD, with a road system dozens of kilometers long linking villages, and drainage systems; it was a local (endogenous) development. Finally the Brazilian mounds (Peripato et al., 2023) and earthworks, which may number 10 to 24 thousand in the Amazon region. They are many different types: fortified plaza-villages, roads, drainage systems, geoglyphs, defensive and ceremonial walls, dated to 500 to 1500 AD.

A theory from the 1800s

Hancock's work echoes the publications of the late 1800s, when American scientists studied the earth mounds of East-Central USA and attributed them to an advanced race. They considered the Native Americans lacked the ability and civilization to have built them.

Below is an imaginary scene of "An American Battle Mound" from "Traditions of De-coo-dah..." by William Pidgeon (1858), which, by the way, in its Chapter XXXV mentions "The extinction of the Mound Builders" in which the author discusses geologic factors (the Noachian Flood) that wiped out the antediluvian civilization of mound-builders!!

1800s Ancient American Battle Mound. Frontpiece of the book

Another example of that mindset is the following quote from "Extinct races of America — the mound builders by Charles Morris, 1870: "Abundant evidence has been found of the previous existence throughout a great portion of the territory of the United States, of a race of people much more civilized than the Indians, and differing widely from them in character. This race has left monuments of its existence upon our soil in an intricate system of earthworks, designed for defence, worship, sepulchre, and other unknown purposes..."

Summarizing, Hancock rehashed obsolete ideas from the 1800s about ancient civilizations, barbarian Amerindians, and Noachian Floods, tying them together with Egypt, Tihuanaco, and Asian civilizations. Good material for a gullible public, with a thirst for this type of entertainment.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Another paper on Introgressions (April 2026)

Continuing with the wide variety of introgression / admixture papers published over the past few years, today I add a new preprint (in Biorxiv, and therefore not peer-reviewed) published a few days ago, on April 12, 2026: Inferring hominin history with recurrent gene flow from single unphased genomes and a two-locus statistic. Nicholas W Collier, Simon Gravel, Aaron P Ragsdale. bioRxiv 2026.04.11.717825; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.11.717825

Through the use of a very particular statistical model (described at the beginning of the paper, and well over my statistical abilities to understand), and genetic analysis of the autosomal DNA, the authors suggest a population structure and admixture, and population sizes for modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and super-archaics that mix to and fro over the past million years. The paper assumes "a fixed mutation rate of 1.3 × 10−8 per bp per generation and a generation time of 29 years" (I have previously posted about mutation rate, its variability, and generation times and the combined effect of them on calculating timelines.

The paper reports the following events and dates:

• Neandertal-Denisovan Common ancestor or ND lived from 779 to 726 kya and lasted for ~50.000 years.
• Ancestral Neanderthals or AN that around 123 kya split into Altai people in Siberia - who later became extinct, and the Western Neandrthals or WN
• Anatomically Modern Humans or AMH introgressed into AN 250 kya ago, and 110 kya into the western Neanderthal (WN) group, which later evolved into the Croatian Vindija and Chagyrskaya (Siberia) lineages.
• Denisovans received gene flow from a ghost lineage, a "Superarchaic" S that may be Homo erectus, it had split from our ancestors 2 million years ago.
• They reckon that the Ust’Ishim people from East Central Siberia dated to around 45 ky were the first humans in Eurasia to split from the other branches after the Out of Africa Event.

The arrows in the chart show the introgression: "broken one-headed arrows denote instantaneous gene flow events; solid double-headed arrows denote continuous gene flow." The percentages, and population sizes (N_e) are also represented:

Figure 6: Early hominin history in Eurasia with recurrent gene flow. From Nicholas W Collier, Simon Gravel, Aaron P Ragsdale, 2026.

The timeline is the following:

TND→AMH (ky) AMH–ND split time 798 CI: 748 – 827
TAN→Den (ky) AN–Denisova split time 688 CI: 639 – 734
TWN→Alt (ky) WN–Altai split time 123 CI: 117 – 137
TCha→Vin (ky) Chagyrskaya–Vindija split time 60.5 CI: 57.3 – 67.7
TYor→OOA (ky) Yoruba–OOA split time 56.9 CI: 53.6 – 60
TOOA→BE (ky) OOA–BE split time 54.7 CI: 49.7 – 57.6
TLos→Stu (ky) Loschbour→Stuttgart admixture time 29.4 CI: 13.2 – 35.9

The authors conclude that "Using these advances, we inferred a demographic model that broadly explained observed H2 patterns and integrated major supported features in hominin evolution, including recurrent interbreeding between Neanderthals and AMH, introgression from a distantly-related, unsampled lineage to Denisovans, and population structure in western Eurasian AMH."

There is no Denisovan to AMH admixture in this model, it seems to only focus on Northern and Western Eurasians, and does not consider Eastern, Southern or Southeastern Asians and Oceanians.

Effective Populations

I found the Effective population sizes to be of interest (the N_e). As you can see, the Ancient basal root at the top of the image (A) has a large population from which the Superarchaics (S), the modern humans (AMH) split from and conserve a large population size, the ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans (ND) has a tiny population and remain that size, so do the N, Denisovans, and the original Out of Africa migration group (bottleneck). The Yoruba people retain a large population.

The paper says that the original Ancestral population had an N_e of 16500 individuals (CI: 15900 – 17300) and then it says "We fixed the effective size of the Superarchaic lineage (S) to 20,000" So the superarchaics splitting from the Ancestral line into Eurasia didn't suffer a bottleneck? Why?

Yet the other groups splitting from the Ancestral group did! The authors explain this large Superarchaic population size as follows: "We justified fixing the population size of S with the observation that changing the effective size of a ghost lineage which makes a small ancestry contribution to a sampled lineage has a negligible effect on E[H2]." So, their model and formulation allows these unrealistic assumptions.

The upper part of the image further down, shows how the Superarchaic introgression into Denisovans affects the population sizes and dates, their model calculates an outcome with a minor impact on effective populations or the timelines.

Interestingly, they note that small effective population sizes may be an artifact, because they can be "plausibly explained by geographic population structure. With spatial structure, recent ancestors are expected to live in closer proximity, and to therefore have a higher probability of sharing parents, than ancient ancestors. Strong structure therefore causes recent coalescence rates to be larger than ancient ones,a pattern which is interpreted as a small recent effective size in a panmictic model."

The paper also notes that "using a lower mutation rate inflated effective size and time parameters, while a higher rate diminished them." They show tables with the effects of different mutation rates as can be seen in the lower part of the image below. The image shows the effects of Superarchaic introgression into Denisovans and the effect of different mutation rates on Ages and N_e of the hominin clades. The original can be seen in tables S8 and S9 in the Supplementary Information of this paper:

The impact of a slower mutation rate can be seen in the older split between ND and our lineage and an older ND split into Denisovans and Neanderthals, but does not affect on more recent events. The impact of mutation rates on the effective population size (N_e) is also variable, some populations have a bigger effective population (A, AMH, Altai, Vindija, Chagyrskaya, Denisovan) while others smaller (ND, Yoruba).

I have already posted about mutation rates and how it impacts on N_e and heterozygosity, and mentioned the same effect reported by the authors of this paper: For a given heterozygosity, lower mutation rates increase effective population size. I also posted about the effect of mutation rates on dating splits, lower rates lead to deeper (older) split dates.

However, this paper does not explain why the same mutation rate affects N_e in opposite ways (there is a complex explanation about their model in the Appendix that mentions some effects on the Effective Population size). It does admit that the model, like all models is a simplification of reality: "... we made many approximations to simplify our models. We treated populations as discrete entities, with random mating, piecewise-constant sizes, and instantaneous divergence. Some of these assumptions allow us to model the evolution of HR statistics, while others are useful for formally testing tractable demographic models. Of course, the true evolutionary history includes unmodeled populations, continuously fluctuating population sizes, population structure induced by the spatial distribution of individuals, and variable migration rates... We also made a number of simplifying biological assumptions. We assumed that the genome-wide average germline mutation rate was constant across all lineages throughout the modeled period... We also assumed a constant generation time for all lineages throughout the studied period."

Interesting work.

Introgression Index

Visit my index post, with all the introgression posts in one single place.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Why did the Clovis First Hypothesis last so long?

If the Clovis first hypothesis or theory was wrong, why was it so pervasive? How could it have last for so long? Many factors contributed to its acceptance, consolidation, prevalence, and survival for over 40 years (1935-1975), and a protracted battle over the next 50 years, that is still being waged.

Today's post will explore the reasons behind the love affair of academia with the Clovis first ideology.

I am indebted to the excellent outline posted by https://x.com/MoundLore on X (twitter) which can be seen online here, which helped me organize my thoughts on this matter. I don't believe that the Clovis First theory was a deliberate conspiracy. Instead, it was a combination of different factors that had a catalyzing effect.

1. Initial Acceptance and a Grand Theory

When Howard proposed the Clovis culture, defined its age, and its big-game hunting society, North American archaeology suffered from many problems and lacked a sound, unifying theory:

• There were no dependable dating techniques (eg. radiocarbon dating was developed in the late 1940s, luminescence dating in the 1960s), only stratigraphic ones, which were unreliable. Deep, older dates were not trusted. In fact, the origin of the human fossils in the Old World were dated to a few thousands or tens of thousands of years at that time (~25 ky for Cro-Magnons and ~50 ky for Neanderthals, 500 ky for the Heidelberg man, and 1 My for the Pithecanthropus
• Most scholars had been formed under the influence of Aleš Hrdlic̄ka who imposed his belief that the Native Americans had arrived via Bering Strait, from Asia, recently (initially not more than 3,000 years ago, later increased to 10,000 years after the Folsom stone tools were discovered in the late 1920s). The late arrival was supported by Hrdlic̄ka's conviction that Amerindians descended from Asians (who they resembled), and did so after the Mongoloid race had differentiated (sorry for the term, but it was used at that time), he stubbornly refused to accept any pre-modern (i.e. Neanderthal) presence in America. Therefore, most American archaeologists supported a recent arrival of the ancestors of Native Americans to the New World.
• The natives were considered a lower race, weak, and feeble-minded, and scientists collected artifacts, bones, skulls, and ignored native myths and beliefs while trying to interpret the data.

The discovery of the Folsom site in the late 1920s shook the archaeological community, man-made stone tools were found beside extinct Pleistocene bisons. Humans had lived in America for at least 10,000 or more years. This was followed by the even earlier Clovis points that were then found in different locations across North America, of a similar late Pleistocene age (breaking with the previous dogma set by Hrdlic̄ka), and coinciding with the demise of the megafauna like mammoths, large bisons, camels, and giant sloths, was a catalyst that brought all these elements together into a new race of big-game hunters 12,000 years ago, that took the New World by surprise as soon as the ice sheets retreated. Nice and neat, intellectualy comfortable, no loose ends.

Although there had been some isolated claims about early Pleistocene findings, they had been silenced by academic orthodoxy before the Folsom and Clovis discoveries (Jenks, 1932 and Jenks, 1937, and his Minnesota Man), and the Natchez human pelvis found below the level of megafauna remains (Wilson, 1895).

Clovis provided a coherent framework for scientists to work with, based on their preconceptions and assumptions. Soon Clovis sites appeared across America.

2. Clovis becomes Mainstream

The acceptance, and further discoveries fueled publications, fed collections, expanded slots in museums, and became included in textbooks. Clovis was taught in college to a new generation of archaeologists. The general public became aware of the Clovis people.

Each new site contributed to reinforcing the preceeding findings. Academic careers were built on these discoveries. Tenures and publications resulted from research projects linked to Clovis.

The outcome of this process was the entrenchment of the Clovis idea in the archaeological community. Funding and grants were awarded to projects that would support the Clovis notion. Challenging theories were discarded and went unfunded.

Even if a scholar went ahead and produced research that conflicted with the Clovis orthodoxy, it was rejected during the peer review process. Journals refused to publish them.

3. Resistance to Change

Thomas Kuhn outlined the concept of paradigm shift in science, it is a natural process by which theories and basic assumptions change. Science moves forward in bursts, when a revolution ousts an entrenched orthodoxy (an existing "paradigm") replacing it with a new one.

As anomalies appear (sites that are older than the established paradigm), tensions build up, and before the crisis, the orthodoxy fights back. Accepting a new paradigm implies rewriting history, modifying books, upsetting established courses in colleges, modifying museum layouts. Change is costly and people resist it.

Watchdogs appear. The role of Hrdlic̄ka as the gatekeeper, and watchdog, in the case of Clovis First, was played by C. Vance Haynes. His work at Tule Springs, a site located close to Las Vegas, Nevada, US, converted him into an ardent supporter of the Clovis First theory. He has been described as the Godfather within the "Clovis mafia".

Haynes research at Tule Springs led him to believe that there had been no humans at that site prior to 13 ky BP. There were animal remains spanning tens of thousands of years, but the only humans were the Clovis, and they appeared all of a sudden, 13,000 years ago.

In my next post I will mention Haynes and a pre-Clovis tool that he found, and ignored, possibly 30,000 years old, there at Tule Springs.

Haynes and the notion of a late ice-free corridor (published in the mid 1960s), made the theory invulnerable to attacks. Haynes refuted, identified trivial weaknesses, attacked, and disqualified other findings.

An online article in the Smithsonian magazine describes the negation and suppression of pre-Clovis dates: "It was a brutal experience, something that Cinq-Mars once likened to the Spanish Inquisition. At conferences, audiences paid little heed to his presentations, giving short shrift to the evidence. Other researchers listened politely, then questioned his competence. The result was always the same. “When Jacques proposed [that Bluefish Caves was] 24,000, it was not accepted,” says William Josie, director of natural resources at the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in Old Crow. In his office at the Canadian Museum of History, Cinq-Mars fumed at the wall of closed minds. Funding for his Bluefish work grew scarce: his fieldwork eventually sputtered and died."

4. Religion

The Christian Bible upholds certain dogma, like the Noachian flood, the dispersal of races after the failed Babylon tower project, and an early (a few millennia) origin of mankind (God's creation of Adam and Eve). These pose time constraints that cause friction with scientific theories.

There are several weird ideas related to religion involving the peopling of America, these are some examples that I found online: The Clovis people died in Noah's flood, Clovis people descended from Noah arrived by boat after the Flood, they reached America after the Babel dispersion.

It may not seem important, but don't forget that a 2025 Religious poll found that 57% of adult Americans believe that Hell exists, 49% believe that the Bible is 100% accurate in its teachings, 68% believe in an unchanging God and 71% assume him as a Trinity (God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit).

5. Cultural Dominance

But what about the Native Americans. These people have their own creation myths, oral traditions dating back in time that state that they have always been here, in America, since Time inmemorial.

Now, in a more woke period, Richard W. Stoffle, Kathleen A. Van Vlack, Heather H. Lim, Alannah Bell, Landon Yarrington, 2024 note that the Native Americans ancient beliefs are gaining relevance among scholars. These authors acknowledge that it wasn't always the case:

"... the Clovis first theory... was the dominant interpretation of the past throughout most of the 20th century and into the 21st century. It precluded the acceptance of Native American Pleistocene observations as they were presented in Native rock paintings, rock peckings, and oral history that depicted and interpreted large Pleistocene animals and glacial wetland ecology. During this time, it was the standard practice of western scholars and land managers to reject Native interpretations of ancient times. Pleistocene-specific observations were even removed from ethnographic reports by land managers and debunked in science papers and journals because Native American observations did not align with what western scientists deemed to be true"

Native Americans were silenced and ignored. They didn't support the Clovis First theory, or in fact any theory that puts their position as "First People", or, as we call them in South America, Pueblos Originarios (Original People).

One of the few natives to reject the Clovis First theory was a Native American named Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005), he was a lawyer, theologist, university professor and scholar. As a Standing Rock Lakota, he held a strong point of view about Western civilization and academia, and its influence on how history is written. He was an advocate for the rights and claims of Native Americans.

In his controversial and provocative book Red Earth White Lies, published in 1995 he criticizes Western science and puts forward many pseudoscientific notions, for instance, that geology is mistaken, humans and dinosaurs were contemporaries, high levels of carbon dioxide and a fluctuating gravity coefficient lead to gigantism, and the theory of Evolution is wrong, just to mention a few. However he does hit the nail on the head when he suggests that scientists revere orthodoxy, and science is essentially a religion, with its scientific myths.

It should be noted that Deloria believed that the oral traditions of Native Americans accurately describe what happened in the past. Their versions should be considered the truth until science can provide strong, data-backed evidence to refute them. This concept also had a political point of view, to ratify the Native American people's oral tradition as being the correct interpretation of historic events, such as the treaties they were forced to sign with the U.S. or Canada.

Stoffle et al., 2025, acknowledge Deloria's work and adopt a critical view science's attitude: "that there is no Native truth unless it is supported by western truth —an argument that only further validates Deloria's claims that Native American knowledge and history are being suppressed by the limitations of western science."

Philip J. Deloria, Vine's son, wrote that his father's book is hard to defend. However, he understands where his father was going with it. Vine Deloria believed that the Beringia crossing into America made Native Americans migrants, they were one of many who migrated to America, with the Western Europeans being the last. The Natives did so early, but were migrants just the same we are all migrants in the New World. He also disagreed with the notion that these first people entered a vacant, virgin continent, untouched by humans, it wasn't owned, it was there to be taken. The idea that these new-arrivals then overkilled the megafauna to extinction, a gross violation of the idea that Native Americans understood their environment and were stewards, led him to propose catastrophic events leading to the extinction.

Conclusion

Only when irrefutable evidence had accumulated, and genetic information backed by these earlier archaeological dates put forward early dates for genetic splits in Asian lineages, did the Clovis First yield. Slowly, but inevitably the pre-Clovis field gained momentum and is now the prevailing dogma, though, some holdouts of the former orthodoxy remain, like Surovell.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

21 ky old cut marks on a glyptodont in Argentina

This post will discuss a research paper published in 2024, that describes man-made cuts on the bones of an extinct megafaunal mammal, some 21,000 years ago in the Argentine Pampas in Buenos Aires, very close to the city of Buenos Aires.

The research article is the following (notice its title!): Del Papa M, De Los Reyes M, Poiré DG, Rascovan N, Jofré G, Delgado M (2024) Anthropic cut marks in extinct megafauna bones from the Pampean region (Argentina) at the last glacial maximum. PLoS ONE 19(7): e0304956. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304956

The paper's abstract clearly states an old date for human presence in Southern South America: " we present the analysis of fossil remains with cutmarks belonging to a specimen of Neosclerocalyptus (Xenarthra, Glyptodontidae), found on the banks of the Reconquista River, northeast of the Pampean region (Argentina), whose AMS 14C dating corresponds to the Last Glacial Maximum (21,090–20,811 cal YBP)."

Fig 9. Drawing of a Neosclerocalyptus skeleton highlighting cut-marked skeletal elements in light blue found at the CRS-10 specimen.. From Del Papa et al., 2024

The article concludes, after discussing the subject in depth, that:

"Our results, fit with recent findings showing evidence of human occupation between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago in Central and South America as well as North America. Finally, a recent study has suggested that the upper limits of the chronological range for megamammal species commonly exploited by humans in South America date back to 18 k cal BP while the archaeological signal goes back to 16 k cal BP, indicating, along with the evidence provided by others sites mentioned above, that the archaeological signal of the human occupation of southern South America is consistently and progressively reaching the Last Glacial Maximum. Taken together, these evidences allow envisages a new perspective regarding the timing of the initial entry of humans to the Americas."

So this is another very old site that reveals a very early presence of human beings in the southern reaches of South America 21,000 years ago. When did these people enter the New World? Possibly 30 or more kya. Again, I wonder how many similar or even older sites are out there, waiting to be discovered?

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Arroyo Vizcaino, Uruguay: a 33 ky spear lesion in an extinct ground sloth

This is another post in my series on pre-Clovis sites in America. A bone of an extinct ground sloth, a Lestodon, found in Uruguay, close to its capital city of Montevideo was reported last year by Fariña et al. The research paper cautiously suggests that the hole in the bone of this sloth was caused by humans, 33,000 years ago.

Read the original paper: Fariña RA, Hayes E, Lemoine LA, Fullagar R, Tambusso PS, Varela L (2025) An indentation in a 33,000-year-old right calcaneus of the ground sloth Lestodon (Xenarthra, Folivora) from Uruguay and its possible human agency. Swiss Journal of Palaeontology 144: 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13358-025-00379-0

The hole caused by... a spear? 33,000 years ago. From Fariña et al., 2025

The hole in the right calcaneus (a bone in the paw) of a ground sloth (Lestodon armatus), was found in Uruguay, in a site by a creek (Arroyo Vizcaíno), that has been dated by radiocarbon to 33,000 cal years ago. The authors, who made a cast of the hole and sampled it "argue that it could have been created by a penetrating object with a rounded tip, possibly a bone, ivory or hardened wood tip attached to a shaft. This evidence contributes to discussions on the dates of human arrival in South America and the potential interactions with the megafauna."

The paper points out that the lesion hadn't healed, it was not caused by cancer (neoplasia). It discards an attack by a predator as there are no other lesions in the bones (why would only one tooth of the preadotr impact the prey?). The article finds damage associated with fracture caused by penetration.

"The analysis of the mark and rounded surfaces within the indentation suggests that the perforating object had a rounded cross-section without a sharpened tip. We propose it was more likely to be made of bone, ivory or (less likely) hardened wood, inserted into a shaft or sleeve that was long enough to allow sufficient energy to penetrate the thick bone and allow rotational and lateral movement to generate the double cavity visible in the CT scan. In addition, the attack angle and location suggests a very close range attack of about 1 or 2 m away, which requires a club like and a hafted point heavy enough to produce the force required to break the relatively thick flat face of the calcaneus at this short distance."

Interestingly, the authors note a link with Siberian hunting technology: "Osseous projectile technologies are representative of the Early Upper Palaeolithic to Late Upper Palaeolithic industries in central and eastern Siberia and are key to understanding initial human dispersal in the Americas." In a recent post, I mentioned this when I wrote about the Yana Rive Site in Siberia and their bone foreshafts!

This is just another pre-Clovis site, but 33,000 years old, in Southern South America. Which prompts me to ask: how many more are out there, waiting to be discovered? and also why are so few discovered? Lack of research funds in South America seems to be the main reason, because when the local researchers look for pre-Clovis evidence, they find it!

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Japanese and pre-Clovis North American stone points are similar, and 20 ky old

Continuing with the Clovis people, and their lanceolate stone points (leaf shaped, without a stem, with a flatter, concave tip opposite its point), a paper published in Science by Madsen et al., 2025 reported that similar stone-knapping technologies were used in Japan around 20,000 years ago and in North America 15,000 to 16,000 years ago, producing stemmed stone points. This occurred before the Clovis-style lanceolate points appeared.

This is the paper: David B. Madsen et al., Characterizing the American Upper Paleolithic. Sci. Adv. 11, eady9545(2025). DOI :10.1126/sciadv.ady9545. I had already posted about it in the context of an early peopling of America, today I will refer to it in the context of Clovis "late" and also an even earlier arrival date into America before 27 kya.

The paper studied tools found in ten different ancient pre-Clovis sites (including Friedkin and Page-Ladson mentioned in my previous post) dating back to the North American Upper Paleolitic (AUP) and compared them with tools unearthed in Japan.

With some the exception of the Schaefer, Hebior, and White Sands sites, all the others share similar stone working technologies and are ancient: "Age estimates associated with the basal AUP components at these sites range between ~20,000 and ~13,500 cal yr B.P. Because the 10 sites are widely distributed across North America south of the ice sheet, the AUP populations associated with their occupations were also apparently widespread, albeit perhaps thinly. Given this wide distribution and the associated age range, we speculate that the initial occupation of lower-latitude North America likely occurred around 20,000 cal yr B.P."

This is interesting, widespread across the subcontinent 20 ky ago! The paper also questions the Beringian origin and the "standstill" hypothesis.

"... there are no known stone tool complexes in Beringia that are old enough and/or similar enough to be possible progenitors of AUP technology. All lithic tool assemblages in eastern Beringia postdate ~14,500 cal yr B.P., lack large core-and-blade production, and are characterized by a microblade technology and a small “teardrop-shaped” projectile point pattern that is not found in the AUP.
...
In other words, present speculation that ANA [Ancient Native American] populations and AUP technology originated in Beringia, e.g., (7, 8), is just that—speculation—and so we need to look elsewhere for a likely cultural progenitor of the AUP. The archeological record of the northwestern Pacific Rim’s Paleo-Sakhalin-Hokkaido-Kuril (PSHK) peninsula and its vicinities in continental East Asia is older than the AUP, is geographically most proximal to North America, and is therefore the more likely region where an AUP cultural progenitor may be found.
...
The distinctive technological features seen in Hokkaido LUP [Late Upper Paleolithic] lithic assemblages dating to between ~20,000 and ~16,000 cal yr B.P. provide some of the strongest clues potentially linking the cultural patterns of the LUP in the PSHK to the AUP. While we cannot yet determine whether the LUP populations on Hokkaido or elsewhere in the PSHK [Paleo-Sakhalin-Hokkaido-Kuril region] (or Beringia, for that matter) were directly genetically related to the First Americans, their technological lithic traditions do suggest potential cultural connections. "

Map showing the locations mentioned in the paperE. Fig. 1 in Madsen et al., 2025

Clovis period was short lived

Clovis points appeared ~13,275 to ~12,980 cal yr B.P. but "were largely abandoned by the end of the very short ~600 to ~250-year Clovis period" they were replaced by the Folsom style points.

Lack of Microblades hint at a very early date for the peopling of America: older than 27 kya

The theory sounds interesting, but there are some things that it does not explain. For instance, there are no microblades in among the AUP stone tools. Yet these are found in Northeastern Asia and Hokkaido in Japan in sites that are older than 20,000 years (Figure 9 in the paper shows that microblades first appeared 27 kya). The authors find this "intriguing" (because they are constrained by orthodox pre-Clovis dates for the peopling of America which do not contemplate very early dates). They suggest that microblades are an adaptation to the colder environment of Northern Asia (?). A simple explanation is that the first people to reach America did so before microblades were developed, in other words they did so over 27 ky ago.

And, unsurprisingly, the paper states that "Although the exact timing is uncertain, the ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets appears to have closed by around 26,000 cal yr B.P. and remained impassable until after the appearance of AUP sites south of the continental ice sheets." This, in my opinion suggests that these people entered America before 26,000 years ago while the corridor was open (which coincides, more or less, with the 27 ky limit mentioned above). What other proof do you need?

But the paper, constrained by current orthodox timelines proposes a later migration along a coastal route 20,000 years ago and proposes the following dates and supporting literature:

"Praetorius et al., in a review of environmental conditions along the Pacific coast of North America, particularly variations in the strength of counterclockwise coastal currents, suggest that the most optimal times for a coastal migration during this period were between ~24,500 and ~22,000 cal yr B.P. and again between ~20,000 and ~19,000 cal yr B.P. Similarly, on the basis of an examination of faunal records from the same southern Alaska and Canadian coastal zone, Steffen concludes that glacial ice cover “probably hindered” migration starting between ~23,300 and ~20,000 cal yr B.P. and lasted until ~18,900 to ~17,700 cal yr B.P. Together, these studies conclude that conditions were optimal for a coastal migration into the Americas sometime about 22,000 years ago, a time estimate compatible with our archeologically based estimate of sometime shortly before ~20,000 cal yr B.P."

The authors also open the window for an earlier migration, by sea (as mentioned in my previous post on this paper) "Alternatively, the migration may have been rapid but also have occurred any time. By ~30,000 cal yr B.P., Upper Paleolithic seafarers were using sea-going vessels to access some of the outer islands in the Japanese archipelago, and were capable of negotiating the Kuroshio Current, one of the fastest in the world. This suggests that such experienced seafarers may also have been capable of handling adverse Pacific coastal currents. Either way, environmental constraints on the timing of the initial occupation of the Americas may not have been much of a factor."

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Two pre-Clovis sites (Florida and Texas)

Continuing with my series on pre-Clovis sites, today's post will mention two research papers published in Science in 2016 and 2018 describing the ages and artifacts unearthed at pre-Clovis archeological sites in Florida and Texas, USA.

14,550-year-old site in Page-Ladson site, Florida

Jessi J. Halligan et al., Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas. Sci. Adv. 2, e1600375(2016). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.1600375 reported this site located on the Aucilla River, beneath 9 m (27 ft) of water, on the panhandle side of Florida.

The site had been explored between 1983 and 1997 and the dating of 14.4 ky had been disputed by the Clovis "firsters". Halligan et al. revisited the spot in 2012-2014 and confirmed its antiquity. They recovered several chert tools. Interestingly, the original excavation had found domestic dog bones, but Halligan et al. didn't manage to confirm this finding. If it was verified, the domestic dog would have arrived in America with these pre-Clovis people!

"At Page-Ladson, hunter-gatherers, possibly accompanied by dogs, butchered or scavenged a mastodon carcass at the sinkhole’s edge next to a small pond at ~14,550 cal yr B.P. These people had successfully adapted to their environment; they knew where to find freshwater, game, plants, raw materials for making tools, and other critical resources for survival. This occupation was during the ~14,000 to 15,000 cal yr B.P. period when there is clear evidence that humans were exploring and settling the Americas. Page-Ladson is located ~8500 km from Monte Verde, ~3500 km from Paisley Caves, and ~1500 km from the Schaefer, Hebior, and Friedkin sites, where other successful groups of hunter-gatherers were adapting to those environments. As at other places, the people at Page-Ladson coexisted with and utilized megafauna for ~2000 years before these animals became extinct at ~12,600 cal yr B.P.; however, the role humans played in this extinction process is unknown.
The record of human habitation of the Americas between ~14,000 and 15,000 cal yr B.P. is sparse but real. The rarity of these early sites along the Gulf Coastal Plain of North America is largely due to two factors: sediment preservation, and burial and submergence during the late Pleistocene transgression. Page-Ladson shows that much of the earliest record of human habitation of the American Southeast lies submerged and buried in unique depositional settings like those found along the Aucilla River. This record can only be accessed through underwater investigation, which, if undertaken with intensity and focus, should reveal a rich and abundant pre-Clovis record for the American Southeast."

13,500 to 15,500-year-old site in Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas

Michael R. Waters et al., Pre-Clovis projectile points at the Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas—Implications for the Late Pleistocene peopling of the Americas. Sci. Adv. 4, eaat4505(2018).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aat4505 report the excavations at this site in Texas, USA, and reach some interesting conclusions about the origin of the Clofvis points:

"... below Folsom and Clovis horizons, we find stemmed projectile points dating from ~13.5 to ~15.5 ka ago, with a triangular lanceolate point form appearing ~14 ka ago. The sequential relationship of stemmed projectile points followed by lanceolate forms suggests that lanceolate points are derived from stemmed forms or that they originated from two separate migrations into the Americas."

Clovis and Folsom points are lanceolate (leaf-shaped: an oval shape that tapers towards each tip, with a concave base) but all earlier pre-Clovis points are stemmed, meaning they have a tapered tip on one end, and a stem to secure it to a shaft on the other). The Fell Cave tools used in South America are also stemmed, suggesting its earlier introduction into the subcontinent.

The maps below outline their conclusions (it also shows the Florida site in Page-Ladson).

Original image caption. Fig. 6 Proposed models explaining the peopling of the Americas. (A) The earliest people exploring the Americas used stemmed projectile points and traveled along the coast ~16 ka ago, moved inland, and reached the Debra L. Friedkin site by ~15.5 ka ago and South America by ~14.2 ka ago (blue arrows). (B) A triangular lanceolate projectile point form develops in situ from the earlier lanceolate stemmed form ~14 ka ago, with Clovis developing ~13 ka ago and spreading across most of the United States and northern Mexico (red arrows). (C) Alternatively, the origin of Clovis may be explained by a second migration that occurs with people using triangular lanceolate points traveling through the ice-free corridor and reaching the Friedkin site by ~14 ka ago. Clovis develops in situ ~13 ka ago and spreads across central and eastern North America (red arrows). Archaeological sites with ages are shown. Colored regions on the map show the general distribution of Clovis, with highest densities in the east (brown), moderate densities in the central United States (orange), and light densities in the west (yellow), overlapping with the Western Stemmed Tradition shown by the cross-hatch pattern.

This paper suggests that the first people to reach North America did so in boats along the Pacific coast as the ice blocked an inland terrestrial route until 14 ky ago. Then they people moved inland from the coast. The authors propose that the lanceolate Clovis and Folsom points evolved from the stemmed points of these first arrivals or, alternatively, that it was brought by a second wave (now, the Clovis aren't first, but second!) of migrants: "Stemmed points could have arrived with the first people to settle the Pacific and Gulf coasts, while other groups carrying some form of lanceolate point could have entered later through the inland, ice-free corridor."

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Topper Site, South Carolina, US - 50 ky old?

Topper site is located in Allendale County, South Carolina, US (see it in Google Maps). It was named after a local who showed it to Albert C. Goodyear, as a chert quarry, and a good spot to look for paleo-Indian stone tools. Goodyear first excavated the site in 1986, and he recovered Clovis-style tools there in the 1990s.

Digging Deeper

Reflecting the mindset of that time (which still prevails), Goodyear said that after hitting the Clovis stone points roughly 3 feet (1 m) below the surface, the dig stopped. After all, there were no people in America before the Clovis arrived (How many times have I written that American archaeologists don't dig deep enough to find older evidence of people in America?)

Goodyear is quoted as saying: "Back then, I wasn’t particularly interested in, or even believed that there probably was any serious pre-Clovis in North America... You don’t look for what you don’t believe in, so I sort of stopped there. I wasn’t finding any artifacts, so to me that was the end of the dig." This is something I have mentioned in previous posts. Nobody digs deep enough to find anything older than 15 ky in America!

But, prodded by the pre-Clovis Monte Verde site in Chile, and the fact that chert of this site would have been a valuable asset for making stone tools to earlier people reaching the area, Goodyear dug deeper (4 meters or 13 feet below the Clovis layer). His efforts were rewarded, he found older tools that were different from the Clovis fluted point style. These tools were relatively simple. They were dated by OSL (luminescence) dating methods to 15.2 ky ago; definitively pre-Clovis.

During his initial explorations (see Goodyear, 2000) he reported that "this date would indicate that the preClovis artifacts, which are found predominantly in the lower half of this unit, are at least 16,000 years old and probably older."

Pre-Clovis stone tools, Topper Site. Fig. 4 in Goodyear, 2000

Digging even deeper into older sediments Goodyear unearthed a chert stone, now known as "Big Red", that shows evidence of human flaking. Goodyear says is probably 50,000 years old Source.

In his 2018 research article (Goodyear, A., 2018. The Pre-Clovis Occupation of the Topper Site, Allendale County, South Carolina. Early Human Life on the Southeastern Coastal Plain), Goodyear states that "Below a substantial Clovis occupation lies a preClovis assemblage consisting of core and flake technologies associated with two Pleistocene alluvial deposits. The deepest occupation is buried in a meander phase terrace with radiocarbon dates in excess of 50,000 years. Indirectly associated radiocarbon dates of the upper alluvial zone indicates an age of 25,000 to 38,000 years ago. Topper is currently oldest radiocarbon dated preClovis site in the Western Hemisphere."

See also another paper published in 2018: Goodyear and Sain, 2018, The Pre-Clovis Occupation of the Topper Site, Allendale County, South Carolina🔒 (free access to the paper🔓). This paper clearly confirms the early dates for this site:

"In their appraisal of the dating of Topper, Waters et al. (2009:1309) reported that it dated diachronously, from minimally about 15,000 yrs B.P. to at least 50,000 or more years. e radiocarbon dating of the WPAS deposit with the cores farther up the terrace ranging from 25,330 B.P. to 28,810 B.P. is the probable minimal age of the upper pre-Clovis assemblage. at being the case, the beginning of the site as found in the Pleistocene ter-race would still be minimally about 50,000 yrs B.P. or more. A time span of 25,000 to 50,000 B.P. or longer is still a remarkable amount of time for a lithic technology to persist, at least by New World standards."

Clovis First Reaction

Of course, Clovis First supporters have had their say suggesting that the old tools are not man-made, but rocks shaped by natural processes, mere geofacts, the site's old ages are also doubted, and they suggest that animal burrows that disturbed the soil, causes younger tools to move downwards and appear deeper, and therefore older. See this article and this one. A 2009 paper politely recognizes the pre-Clovis tools but in a very conditional way, and casts doubts about them being man-made: "Hypothesized pre-Clovis artifacts derive from several stratigraphic units below the Clovis horizon at Topper. However, the anthropogenic origin of the “Topper assemblage” has yet to be adequately demonstrated and it may be natural in origin..."

The Younger Dryas Meteor

Even Surovell in 2009, the person who wrote the Clovis-strikes-back paper about Monte Verde analyzed the Topper Site to discredit a paper that proposed that a meteor impact led to the megafauna extinction and a period known as Younger Dryas (Firestone, 2009). If it was a meteor and not big-game Clovis hunters that killed the mammoths, it undermines the Clovis First theory. As expected from a Clovis-firster, Surovell didn't find proof of any meteor. However, a re-analysis of the site by LeCompte and Goodeayear, 2012 did.

The Younger Dryas event took place between 12.9 and 11.7 kya, and was a sudden cooling event that interrupted the warming period that followed the end of the last Ice Age. Temperatures dropped almost 10°C (18°F), affecting plants, anmilas and humans. The causes are under study. One theory suggests that the freshwater influx from glacial ice melt into the North Atlantic affected the circulation of the warm Gulf Stream current, another posits that a comet or meteor broke up in the upper atmosphere causing a "nuclear winter". But in the Southern Hemisphere, the effect was the opposite, it warmed up!

Personally, I don't have an opinion about the Younger Dryas meteor, but I will post about it in the near future.

The meteoric impact forms part of the conflict between Clovis-firsters and pre-Clovis supporters. Goodyear and LeCompte found more meteoric dust (microspherules) in the Clovis tools sediment layer at Topper and dusting the Clovis tools, but, after removing them, the soil beneatht them had 30 times less microspherules, proof that they fell during the Clovis time. This is rejected by Clovis First supporters, they believe that the Clovis people spread out and hunted the megafauna to extinction and dissipated into other cultures. The meteor with its environmental impact refutes both explanations.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©