Mammoth Hunter’s camp in Stephenville

In the early 1960s, Tarleton students found Clovis points at the site of the new Senior Citizen’s Center, in the city park. The Bosque River channel was much closer to the Clovis camp than today, and the climate (even though this was the Pleistocene) milder and wetter than today. The site is registered with the Texas Historical Commission. The very rare Clovis points were used to kill big game like mammoths, giant bison, camels, and horses, but the weapon system used is still under debate because of lack of evidence. Skeletal remains of these early people (3,500 – 2,900 BP) are also rare, yet tell an interesting story about the Clovis hunters. Bioarcheologists have noted than people in these centuries were as tall as modern populations today, their bones show fewer health and stress indications, their teeth were well spaced so that they had fewer carries, and the wisdom teeth were not crowded like today. There were fewer enamel defects (caused by malnutrition) or other growth disturbances like bone infections or porotic hyperostosis. I find it interesting that the femur midshaft is flattened and thicker, something only found today among Marathon runners. I get the impression that Pleistocene (this is true worldwide) traveled long distances. Then everything changed with the Younger Dryas Event (12,900-11,700 BP) which destroyed the Clovis way of life and reduced the population in North America drastically. The megafauna died out and the kind of vegetation in Central Texas changed dramatically. Later, when agriculture replaced hunting, human bones show a round femur, indicating a more sedentary lifestyle, disease indicators on the bones increase, osteoarthritis from hard work became common, and people were shorter. This hunting to farming change in health was true all over the world because all domestic plants have nutritional deficiencies compared to animal protein. The catastrophic effects of Younger Dryas was disastrous in North America, yet bump-started agriculture in the rest of the world. We lost our large animals that would have been domesticated, while the rest of the world progressed faster with the help of horses and cattle. If it had not been for the Younger Dryas setback – Columbus could have confronted warriors mounted on camels or horses.