For most students of archeology, "Clovis" conjures up a vision of a distinctive spear point like the one shown on the left and of small groups of "big game" hunters killing Ice-Age elephants as they migrated across North America. Clovis peoples with their remarkably sophisticated hunting technology were seen as the first pioneers, highly mobile hunters who walked to North America via the Bering Land Bridge.
Once below the Ice Sheet, small groups of Clovis hunters and their families expanded rapidly across the continent killing mammoths so effectively that the species was pushed over the brink of extinction.
Or so the standard story goes. In the past decade, the Clovis-first hypothesis has come under attack from many directions.
There have been multiple claims of earlier, pre-Clovis sites in North and South America, none totally accepted, but several very credible. And then there are the early skeletal remains found in North America, such as the controversial Kennewick Man, whose features are said to more closely resemble certain Caucasian populations than later Native Americans.
Adding to this, some stone tool experts have made a case for a close resemblance between Clovis technology and that of Late Paleolithic Europe. In the last few years these claims, pro and con, have been reviewed in Time , Newsweek , New Yorker , National Geographic and on the Discovery Channel , among others. Meanwhile at the Gault site deep in the heart of central Texas, Clovis culture is being reconsidered week by week, midway through a planned five-year dig.
