40 Fun Facts About Paleo-Indians

Which animal, now tied to the deserts of Africa and Arabia, roamed North America until Paleo-Indian times?

Camel relatives were native there: Camelops, a true camel, lived in North America for some three million years and died out around 12,000 years ago.

Two college students stumbled on Kennewick Man's skull in a Washington river while watching which kind of event?

A boat race for hydroplanes was under way in 1996 when the pair found the skull in the shallows, hid it in bushes until the finish, then took it to police in a bucket.

Which human traces from Oregon's Paisley Caves yielded DNA more than 14,000 years old?

Dried feces, known to scientists as coprolites, gave the Paisley Caves the oldest human DNA yet found in the Americas, about a thousand years older than Clovis.

Which animal died out in North America in Paleo-Indian times and returned only aboard Spanish ships?

Horse evolution played out largely in North America, yet the animals vanished there about 10,000 years ago and stayed gone until colonists shipped them back from 1493.

Megalonyx, a giant ground sloth of Paleo-Indian North America, was first described by which future US president?

Thomas Jefferson examined its huge claws in the 1790s, and the largest species, a sloth about three metres long, now carries his name.

Human footprints up to 23,000 years old, far older than Clovis, were found in which US national park?

White Sands National Park in New Mexico holds the prints in seven soil layers, dated from seeds buried alongside them, though some scientists dispute the ages.

Clovis hunters are thought to have launched darts with a spear-thrower known by which word from the Aztec language?

Atlatl is the Nahuatl name for a throwing lever that works as an extension of the arm, sending a dart away far faster than a bare hand can.

George McJunkin, the formerly enslaved man who found the Folsom bison bones after a flash flood, held which job?

Cowboy and ranch foreman McJunkin saw that the bones were too big for modern bison, and spent years urging scientists to come and look.

Which domesticated animal, later used to pull a travois, reached North America from Siberia in Paleo-Indian times?

Dog remains show the animals crossed from Siberia and then stayed isolated in the Americas for about 9,000 years, until colonists' breeds replaced them.

Monte Verde, the camp whose early dates upended the Clovis-first theory, lies in which South American country?

Chile holds Monte Verde, where a peat bog preserved hut posts, rope and even a human footprint; its excavators date it to 14,500 years ago, though a 2026 study argues it is far younger.

Which name do scientists give the Ice Age land bridge that once joined Siberia and Alaska?

Beringia was named in 1937 after the explorer Vitus Bering, and at its greatest extent the bridge was about 1,000 km wide.

Luzia, an 11,500-year-old woman nicknamed in homage to the fossil Lucy, was found in a cave in which country?

Brazil's Lapa Vermelha cave held Luzia; her skeleton was broken apart when fire destroyed the country's National Museum in 2018, though most of it was later recovered from the rubble.

The 'paleo' in Paleo-Indian comes from a Greek word with which meaning?

Ancient is the sense of the Greek palaiós, and the label was coined in 1940 for the artefacts themselves; only later did it come to mean the people.

Paleo-Indians in South America hunted gomphotheres, extinct relatives of which living animal?

Elephant cousins called gomphotheres reached South America during the Ice Age and vanished about 12,000 years ago, soon after people arrived.

Glyptodonts, shelled giants that Paleo-Indians hunted, belonged to which animal group still alive today?

Armadillos include the extinct glyptodonts, whose domed shells were built from hundreds of interlocking bony plates; the largest weighed around two tonnes.

Castoroides, a bear-sized rodent that shared North America with Paleo-Indians, was a giant form of which animal?

Beaver giants of the genus Castoroides were North America's largest Ice Age rodents, and their bones lay beside Paleo-Indian tools in Ohio's Sheriden Cave.

The sandals found in Oregon's Fort Rock Cave, some over 9,000 years old, were woven from which material?

Sagebrush bark made the sandals, which Luther Cressman's team dug out in 1938 from beneath ash laid down by the eruption that formed Crater Lake.

North America's oldest known painted object, a Folsom-age bison skull from Oklahoma, carries which red design?

A zigzag in red runs across the skull from the Cooper site, where Folsom hunters made three separate kills of twenty or more bison.

At Washington's Manis site, a bone spear tip about 13,800 years old was found lodged in the rib of which animal?

Mastodon bone had grown around the tip, which was carved from a second animal's bone, showing the beast survived that attack.

The widely rejected Solutrean hypothesis says the makers of Clovis points descended from people of which continent?

Europe was proposed because Solutrean flint tools look a little like Clovis points, but DNA ties the first Americans to Siberia instead.

Which weapon, not yet in use when Folsom hunters killed bison, spread across North America around 500 AD?

Bow and arrow technology reached the Americas through Alaska long after the first hunters, so Folsom and Clovis points tipped spears or darts instead.

Paleo-Indians made spear points by striking flakes off flint or chert, a craft known by which name?

Knapping comes from an old word for striking sharply, probably imitating the sound; the same craft later shaped gunflints for flintlock firearms.

Paul S. Martin's much-argued explanation for the loss of North America's Ice Age giants goes by which name?

The Overkill hypothesis blames newly arrived hunters and is still argued over: in a 2012 survey, 63% of archaeologists put the extinctions down to a combination of factors.

The Younger Dryas, a sudden cold spell that began in late Clovis times, takes its name from which kind of thing?

A flower of the tundra, Dryas octopetala, left so many fossils in Scandinavian sediments of that age that the cold spell was named after it.

The only known Clovis burial, a toddler laid to rest with over 100 tools, was found in which US state?

Montana construction workers uncovered the Anzick child in 1968, and his was the first early Native American genome to be fully sequenced.

Clovis people dusted burials and buried tool stockpiles with which red mineral pigment?

Ochre mattered enough that Clovis people are known to have carried it 100 km from the outcrop where it was dug.

Meadowcroft Rockshelter, where people may have camped for at least 16,000 years, overlooks a creek in which US state?

Pennsylvania's Meadowcroft came to light in 1955, when Albert Miller found artefacts in a groundhog burrow; full excavation began in 1973.

Naia, a teenage girl who died about 13,000 years ago, was found in a Mexican sinkhole whose Spanish name means what?

Black Hole, or Hoyo Negro, was a mostly dry pit when she is thought to have fallen in; her skeleton was found in 2007 among animal bones.

The Spirit Cave mummy, the oldest human mummy found in North America, was discovered in which US state?

Nevada's Spirit Cave mummy, wrapped in a rabbit-skin blanket and reed mats, was thought to be about 2,000 years old until 1990s radiocarbon tests showed it was more than 9,000.

Arlington Springs Man, who lived about 13,000 years ago, was found on an island off which US state?

California's Santa Rosa Island gave up his bones in 1959; reaching an island that early meant his people had boats, a strong point for a coastal route south.

Which technique, new in the 1950s, finally let scientists measure the true age of the Folsom bison bones?

Radiocarbon dating, devised by Willard Libby in the late 1940s, won him a Nobel Prize and turned guesses about the first Americans into measured ages.

The original Folsom point, still lodged between two bison ribs, is on display in a museum in which city?

Denver's museum left the point where it lay and invited other archaeologists to see it among the bones; they agreed it was as old as the extinct bison.

Which vast ice sheet buried most of Canada in Paleo-Indian times and gouged out the Great Lakes?

Laurentide ice lay up to 3 km thick over Quebec, and the gap that opened between it and a smaller western sheet was long seen as the first road south.

Which period follows the Paleo-Indian era in North American archaeology, as the climate warmed and big game vanished?

Archaic peoples still moved with the seasons but leaned on local small game, fish and plant foods as the last of the giant animals disappeared.

DNA from a boy buried 24,000 years ago near which Russian lake revealed ancestry shared with Native Americans?

Baikal's Mal'ta boy came from a vanished Ice Age population of northern Eurasia, partial ancestors of both Siberians and Native Americans.

Page-Ladson, a flooded sinkhole holding human artefacts about 14,500 years old, lies on a riverbed in which US state?

Florida's Aucilla River now covers the sinkhole, a rare supply of fresh water when the Ice Age landscape was far drier; Navy SEAL Buddy Page showed divers the spot.

Which nickname is given to the idea that the first Americans travelled south by sea along the Pacific coast?

The kelp highway idea holds that seaweed forests fed and guided early seafarers, though rising seas have since drowned most camps they might have left.

Bluefish Caves, where cut-marked animal bones hint at people 24,000 years ago, lie in which part of Canada?

Yukon's Bluefish Caves were dug by Jacques Cinq-Mars from 1977 to 1987, and his early dates are still contested because the bones' layers are uncertain.

What do archaeologists call the buried stockpiles of points and tools that Clovis people left to collect later?

Caches are a Clovis hallmark that later cultures largely dropped; over twenty have turned up across North America, some possibly left as offerings.

Which term describes the long groove chipped up from the base of both Clovis and Folsom spear points?

Fluting ran almost the whole length of a Folsom point, and took such skill that modern experimenters needed many years to copy it.