This new genetic work leaves no doubt that the earliest migrants to this continent were the biological ancestors of recent people, and that these migrants were unambiguously Asians, not Europeans. But even if the first people in the New World and Colorado arrived here from Asia, it is less certain when they arrived.
People were certainly in what is now Colorado by 11, BC, producing the distinctive and beautiful spear points and other artifacts classified as Clovis. But it is also possible that people were here earlier. Sites dated as early as 39, years ago, including the Dutton and Selby sites near Wray and the Villa Grove site in Saguache County , contain the bones of large, extinct animals broken in ways that suggest human action. However, these localities produce no stone artifacts at all, and very few archaeologists accept them as definite evidence of human occupation.
By about 11, BC, though, discoveries of Clovis artifacts in sites with the bones of at least some of these animals leave no doubt that people were here. The best-known Clovis sites in North America are mammoth kills, and this has led many to view Clovis people as specialized big-game hunters. By themselves, however, these sites are misleading since large bones like those of mammoths always attract archaeological attention, and digging around them can hardly tell us about activities other than hunting.
Clovis campsites best known from Texas tell a very different story. Clovis people relied on a wide array of large and small animals. They also cached tools on the landscape. Three of these tool caches are in Colorado: the CW and Drake caches from northeastern Colorado and the Mahaffy cache from within the city of Boulder Figure 2.
The CW cache includes tools made from stone that outcrops north of Sterling , but the other two include material from the Texas Panhandle the Drake cache and from across the Continental Divide as far away as Utah the Mahaffy cache. These discoveries suggest movements over very large areas, although it is uncertain whether families, individuals, or larger social groups made these movements. By some time after 11, BC, most large mammals in North America, including mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, and many others, were extinct.
A handful of archaeologists think these were simply exterminated by human hunters. However, the overwhelming majority sees no convincing evidence of this and suspects that a combination of environmental change and some degree of human hunting is more probable. In fact, no one knows for certain what caused this extinction, although recent work in modern and ancient animal DNA is beginning to offer fairly detailed answers.
So far, this new work does not suggest extinction by overhunting. Knowledge of human ways of life after 10, BC has increased dramatically. Later Paleo-Indian sites are subdivided by types of spear points: Folsom in the plains and mountains from 10, to about BC and a variety of types Agate Basin, Hell Gap, Scottsbluff, Eden, and so on after that on the plains.
Many plains types also occur in the mountains alongside a number of distinctive mountain points often labeled Foothills-Mountain and Western Stemmed. It is known that Clovis people passed through the high country in Colorado, but essentially nothing is known about what they did there. Later Paleo-Indian groups, though, lived throughout Colorado. On the eastern plains and in the mountain parks, Paleo-Indians hunted bison and other animals.
People undoubtedly hunted in a variety of ways, but large bison kills at sites like Olsen-Chubbuck and Jones-Miller on the eastern plains were communal events that involved large numbers of people and sometimes killed hundreds of animals at a time. Archaeologists have often viewed later Paleo-Indian groups much like those who lived during Clovis times as wide-ranging nomads who rarely or never reused particular places on the landscape.
This is clearly wrong. Paleo-Indian sites throughout the plains, and throughout Colorado—for example, Folsom-age Lindenmeier , near Fort Collins , and Cody-age Jurgens on the plains near Greeley, as well as sites in the mountains—document nearly total reliance on local raw material to make all of their tools other than spear points, implying that they did not travel over particularly large areas. Lindenmeier, perhaps the most spectacular Paleo-Indian site in North America, also shows thick accumulations of debris that mark a place where people camped over and over again for centuries.
DNA and analysis of the shape and nature of teeth point to central Asia as the origin of the Clovis culture. The route through the ice-free corridor in western Canada brought the first groups into what is today Montana, where the oldest known human burial associated with early Paleoindian tools was discovered in and was recently dated to about 11, radiocarbon years before present. Explore This Park. Info Alerts Maps Calendar Reserve.
Alerts In Effect Dismiss. Dismiss View all alerts. Paleoindian Period 12,, BC. Paleoindian Period: 12,, BC The Paleoindian Period refers to a time approximately 12, years ago at the end of the last ice age when humans first appeared in the archeological record in North America.
Certain chipped stone points e. Paleo- Indian flint knappers developed an extremely efficient eleven-step method for transforming a large flake of high-quality stone into a multipurpose cutting implement and, later, into a Folsom point, two "razor blades," and a "lathe" tool.
Larger stone points e. Paleo- Indian tool kits also included chipped stone tools required to skin and butcher game, scrape skins and hides, and fashion specialized tools and component parts e. One of the first documented discoveries of Paleo-Indian stone tools found together with the bones of extinct Ice Age animals in North America was made by H.
Martin and T. Overton in near Russell Springs, Kansas. A similar find was made by George McJunkin—a cowboy, naturalist, and former black slave—in near Folsom, New Mexico.
But it was not until August 29, , that a fluted spear or "dart" point Folsom was found by archeologists among the bones of extinct bison Bison antiquus at McJunkin's Folsom site. Paleontologists, archeologists, and anthropologists were called to inspect this find in its undisturbed context, and only then did the scientific community agree that humans had lived contemporaneously with these now-extinct animals at the end of the last Ice Age.
These accidental finds sparked the initial systematic studies of the Paleo-Indian presence in the North American Great Plains. In the s Clovis projectile points dated 11,—10, B. Later Paleo-Indian occupations 10,— 8, B. With the development of radiocarbon dating in the s, as well as the excavation of "layer-cakelike" sites at Blackwater Draw, New Mexico, and Hell Gap, Wyoming, archeologists outlined the time frame for Paleo-Indian life in the Great Plains that is used today.
Paleo-Indians left a scant "trail" throughout the Great Plains. Geographer Vance Holliday has estimated that archeologists have found roughly two Paleo-Indian campsites for each century of their currently documented 2, year-long stay in the Great Plains. In the Southern High Plains, this means that there is one Paleo-Indian campsite per square miles 1, square kilometers. Yet Paleo-Indian sites are still being discovered, including campsites e.
Researchers have also intensified their efforts to revise and to reformulate their reconstructions of past environments and Paleo-Indian life. Archeologists had generally assumed that the Great Plains during the late glacial period supported a widespread boreal forest composed predominantly of spruce trees.
This spruce forest reconstruction is not supported by a fossil record that is dominated by grazing and browsing mammals.
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