Paleo-Indians
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40 free Paleo-Indians trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Paleo-Indians were the first people to settle the Americas, arriving while ice sheets still covered much of the north. They left no writing, so everything known about them comes from stone points, campsites, butchered bones and a handful of burials. This quiz collects the best fun facts about the Paleo-Indians: how they reached a new world, the giant animals they lived beside and hunted, the Clovis and Folsom toolmakers, and the surprising discoveries, some made by complete amateurs, that keep pushing the story further back. It suits students meeting the topic for the first time, teachers looking for a classroom warm-up, and anyone curious about life at the close of the Ice Age. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal, now tied to the deserts of Africa and Arabia, roamed North America until Paleo-Indian times?
Camel
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.
Q 02Two college students stumbled on Kennewick Man's skull in a Washington river while watching which kind of event?
A boat race
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.
Q 03Which human traces from Oregon's Paisley Caves yielded DNA more than 14,000 years old?
Dried feces
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.
Q 04Which animal died out in North America in Paleo-Indian times and returned only aboard Spanish ships?
Horse
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.
Q 05Megalonyx, a giant ground sloth of Paleo-Indian North America, was first described by which future US president?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson examined its huge claws in the 1790s, and the largest species, a sloth about three metres long, now carries his name.
Q 06Human footprints up to 23,000 years old, far older than Clovis, were found in which US national park?
White Sands
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.
Q 07Clovis hunters are thought to have launched darts with a spear-thrower known by which word from the Aztec language?
Atlatl
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.
Q 08George McJunkin, the formerly enslaved man who found the Folsom bison bones after a flash flood, held which job?
Cowboy
Cowboy and ranch foreman McJunkin saw that the bones were too big for modern bison, and spent years urging scientists to come and look.
Q 09Which domesticated animal, later used to pull a travois, reached North America from Siberia in Paleo-Indian times?
Dog
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.
Q 10Monte Verde, the camp whose early dates upended the Clovis-first theory, lies in which South American country?
Chile
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.
Q 11Which name do scientists give the Ice Age land bridge that once joined Siberia and Alaska?
Beringia
Beringia was named in 1937 after the explorer Vitus Bering, and at its greatest extent the bridge was about 1,000 km wide.
Q 12Luzia, an 11,500-year-old woman nicknamed in homage to the fossil Lucy, was found in a cave in which country?
Brazil
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.
Q 13The 'paleo' in Paleo-Indian comes from a Greek word with which meaning?
Ancient
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.
Q 21Which weapon, not yet in use when Folsom hunters killed bison, spread across North America around 500 AD?
Bow and arrow
Bow and arrow technology reached the Americas through Alaska long after the first hunters, so Folsom and Clovis points tipped spears or darts instead.
Q 22Paleo-Indians made spear points by striking flakes off flint or chert, a craft known by which name?
Knapping
Knapping comes from an old word for striking sharply, probably imitating the sound; the same craft later shaped gunflints for flintlock firearms.
Q 23Paul S. Martin's much-argued explanation for the loss of North America's Ice Age giants goes by which name?
Overkill hypothesis
Q 14Paleo-Indians in South America hunted gomphotheres, extinct relatives of which living animal?
Elephant
Elephant cousins called gomphotheres reached South America during the Ice Age and vanished about 12,000 years ago, soon after people arrived.
Q 15Glyptodonts, shelled giants that Paleo-Indians hunted, belonged to which animal group still alive today?
Armadillos
Armadillos include the extinct glyptodonts, whose domed shells were built from hundreds of interlocking bony plates; the largest weighed around two tonnes.
Q 16Castoroides, a bear-sized rodent that shared North America with Paleo-Indians, was a giant form of which animal?
Beaver
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.
Q 17The sandals found in Oregon's Fort Rock Cave, some over 9,000 years old, were woven from which material?
Sagebrush bark
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.
Q 18North America's oldest known painted object, a Folsom-age bison skull from Oklahoma, carries which red design?
A zigzag
A zigzag in red runs across the skull from the Cooper site, where Folsom hunters made three separate kills of twenty or more bison.
Q 19At Washington's Manis site, a bone spear tip about 13,800 years old was found lodged in the rib of which animal?
Mastodon
Mastodon bone had grown around the tip, which was carved from a second animal's bone, showing the beast survived that attack.
Q 20The widely rejected Solutrean hypothesis says the makers of Clovis points descended from people of which continent?
Europe
Europe was proposed because Solutrean flint tools look a little like Clovis points, but DNA ties the first Americans to Siberia instead.
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.
Q 24The Younger Dryas, a sudden cold spell that began in late Clovis times, takes its name from which kind of thing?
A flower
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.
Q 25The only known Clovis burial, a toddler laid to rest with over 100 tools, was found in which US state?
Montana
Montana construction workers uncovered the Anzick child in 1968, and his was the first early Native American genome to be fully sequenced.
Q 26Clovis people dusted burials and buried tool stockpiles with which red mineral pigment?
Ochre
Ochre mattered enough that Clovis people are known to have carried it 100 km from the outcrop where it was dug.
Q 27Meadowcroft Rockshelter, where people may have camped for at least 16,000 years, overlooks a creek in which US state?
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania's Meadowcroft came to light in 1955, when Albert Miller found artefacts in a groundhog burrow; full excavation began in 1973.
Q 28Naia, a teenage girl who died about 13,000 years ago, was found in a Mexican sinkhole whose Spanish name means what?
Black Hole
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.
Q 29The Spirit Cave mummy, the oldest human mummy found in North America, was discovered in which US state?
Nevada
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.
Q 30Arlington Springs Man, who lived about 13,000 years ago, was found on an island off which US state?
California
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.