March 24, 2015

Pre-Clovis Hunting in Alberta

New advanced radiocarbon dating has found that Ancient Americans hunting extinct horse and camel species at Wally’s Beach, Alberta were hunting 300 years before the beginning of the Clovis era. 27 new radiocarbon dates verify this assertion.
The finds add to the knowledge that humans were hunting mammoth, mastodon, sloth, and gomphothere species for 2000 years before these species became extinct.
The research was reported in the *Article #14-20650: “Late Pleistocene horse and camel hunting at the southern margin of the ice-free corridor: Reassessing the age of Wally’s Beach, Canada,” by Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford, Jr., Brian Kooyman, and L. V. Hills.
Source: Adapted and edited from the PNAS press release, Large mammals hunted by prehistoric humans

(my note: It is also always good to remember that it would have taken a long time for these ancient Americans to arrive at places like Alberta, so they would have had to leave Asia long before the Clovis era began.)

Popular Archaeology has the report here;
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/spring-2015/article/horse-and-camel-hunting-by-prehistoric-humans-in-north-america