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They raised corn and cotton, and tamed wild turkeys, using the meat for food and the feathers for clothing. In the winter, the Anasazi wore garments fashioned from turkey feathers. The Anasazi were cliff dwellers and built many apartment houses out of closely fitted stones.
One such building, the Pueblo Bonito, had nearly rooms. Utes and Comanches entered the area a few years later. Symbols Histories Timelines Famous People. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights.
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Kris Hirst K. Kris Hirst. Kris Hirst is an archaeologist with 30 years of field experience. Her work has appeared in scholarly publications such as Archaeology Online and Science. Learn about our Editorial Process. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Clovis points had many uses, like a Swiss Army knife, Eren contends. Spear-throwing hunters might have occasionally killed a mammoth, especially one separated from its group or slowed due to injury.
More often, these tools served as knives to cut meat off carcasses of already dead mammoths or as dart tips hurled to scare away other scavenging animals drawn to mammoth remains, Eren and his colleagues conclude in the October Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
A view from the top, right, shows presumed average red and maximum blue penetration depths of Clovis points hurled at high speeds at a mammoth, based on experimental evidence, assuming the weapons passed through dense hair and a thick hide, and avoided bones.
His argument has been greeted with interested skepticism by some Clovis investigators. Eren made the same argument not too long ago. Since then, several lines of evidence have led Eren to retract that claim.
The reconstructions show how well-protected these creatures were from spears heaved or thrust at them. Several frozen carcasses recovered in Asia indicate that woolly mammoth skin was 2 to 3 centimeters thick on average, the group estimates. Beneath the skin lay 8 to 9 centimeters of fat. And above that skin, woolly mammoth hides were covered by 5 to 15 centimeters of dense underfur topped by a layer of outer hairs 10 to 60 centimeters long.
A Clovis point had to plunge 17 to 30 centimeters deep to kill an Asian woolly mammoth, the team calculated. The distance would be close, but not quite as deep, for Columbian mammoths, which may have lacked underfur. With those estimates in mind — and inspired by earlier experiments in which researchers thrust or hurled spears tipped with Clovis points into dead elephants — Eren put the points to the test.
But for a variety of reasons that likely included the condition of carcasses and the speeds at which spears were launched, only some points penetrated deep enough to have reached the vital organs of a mammoth or mastodon. Eren used a lab setup that offered a better chance of shooting Clovis points deep into a hunting target than would have been possible in an actual encounter with a mammoth-sized creature. In one study published in the July Lithic Technology , replicas of seven types of Clovis points covering the sizes and shapes that have been found at archaeological sites were fastened to wooden shafts.
A bow mounted on a shooting device fired each type of Clovis point 30 times into blocks of moist clay from a distance of about 1. Spears traveled at a speed in the upper range of shots that have been propelled by people using spear-throwing tools. The clay blocks, fortified with crystalline silica dust, provided slightly less resistance than the tissue of an elephant or other large animal. Over shots, Clovis points penetrated clay blocks — which lacked the thick skins of mammoths that would have slowed or blocked spears thrown during actual hunts — to an average depth of Penetration depths of four types of points equaled or fell short of the overall average.
Only a couple of shots using the most successful point penetrated as deep as Smaller points tended to pierce deeper into targets than larger points. Ancient mammoth hunters may have hurled slightly larger Clovis points than the experimental replicas and perhaps launched shots with somewhat greater momentum.
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