AncientPages.com - About 13,500 years after nomadic Clovis hunters crossed the frozen land bridge from Asia to North America.
It was very long time ago but researchers are still focused on the subject to find clues as to how they not only survived in a new landscape with unique new challenges but adapted with stone tools and weapons to thrive for thousands of years.
Clovis point replicas and casts in the archaeology lab, Kent State University. Credit: Kent State University
By studying stone projectile points, such as spear points, arrowheads made by flint knapping, the ancient practice of chipping away at the edges of rocks to shape them into weapons and tools, researchers want to better understand the engineering, techniques and purposes of Clovis weapon technologies.
Recent study sheds light on the flint knapping technique of “fluting” the Clovis points, which could be considered the first truly American invention.
See also:
People Who Predated Clovis Culture And Were Present In America Earlier Than Previously Thought
This singular technological attribute, the flake removal or “flute,” is absent from the stone-tool list of Pleistocene Northeast Asia, where the Clovis ancestors came from.
It seems that this fluted point was an invention that allowed these colonizers to travel great distances with some confidence that their weaponry would hold up at least long enough until they could find the next rock quarry to make new points.
“It was risky and couldn’t have been easy to learn how to do this effectively,” explains Metin Eren, Ph.D., director of archaeology and assistant of Kent State University.
“Archaeological evidence suggests that up to one out of five points break when you try to chip this fluted base, and it takes at least 30 minutes to produce a finished specimen.
“So, though it was a time-consuming process and risky technique, successfully fluted Clovis points would have been extremely reliable, especially while traveling great distances into unknown regions on a new continent.“
Apparently they succeeded to create efficient fluted Clovis points, stone weapons that they could use over and over agin.
“It’s amazing to think that people 12,000 years ago were flaking shock absorbers and engineering stone weapons in a way that it took 21st century modern engineering to figure out,” Eren said.
Research is published - here
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