Clovis Spear Points and the Transmission of Knowledge in the Paleolithic Americas

Collection of Clovis spear-points. Wikimedia Commons.

Originally published on my World History class blog on September 29, 2016.

In class tomorrow, we will be discussing the Clovis culture of Paleolithic North America, who are known to us largely from the distinctive style of spear point they used in hunting large game (like woolly mammoths and mastodons). The Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California-Berkeley used 3-D computer imaging to compare examples of Clovis points from collections across North America. What they found was that all of these points were made in the same way, through a process that spread across the continent in less than 200 years. Their work seems to indicate that the process of making these spear points was transmitted both across long distances and across generations. So early human settlers of the Americas were teaching one another how to do this, and through these educational efforts the same technology was practiced in areas hundreds and thousands of miles apart. This article (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. from the Smithsonian Insider website describes the research and has a link to the published results of the study in the Journal of Archaeological Science. It also includes a video that presents one of their 3-D scans, which gives some great perspective on how it can help researchers.