Archaeologica.org

Brad Lepper wrote:The latest issue of Legacy, a publication of the University of South Carolina’s Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, includes a preview of the results of this kind of research on Paleoindian tools from the central Savannah River area of Georgia and South Carolina.

So far, the research team has identified bison blood on several fluted points, including both Clovis and Redstone types of point. The bison in question could be the extant Bison bison or an extint form known as Bison antiquus.

The authors refer to previous work that “found bison residue and residues for numerous extant animals on Clovis points but no evidence of other extinct fauna,” which suggests that “large megafauna were regionally extinct by the time of Clovis, were hunted infrequently, or that our sample size was just too small” to get a representative sample of Paleoindian prey species.

If additional testing of more artifacts confirms what they’ve found so far, the research team suggests that we may need “a fundamental shift in our thinking about early Paleoamerican hunting strategies.”

I think that fundamental shift is already underway.

Previous studies of blood residues on Paleoindian fluted points from Ohio show the same pattern now turning up in South Carolina and Georgia. Clovis points from the Nobles Pond site in Stark County were used to kill or butcher bison, caribou (or deer), and rabbits, but not apparently mastodons or mammoths.