Back in 1968, archaeologists discovered the remains of an 18-month-old child in southwest Montana. The bones date back 13,000 years, and new technologies have allowed researchers to look at the chemical signatures within them. This has shown that woolly mammoths were the most common food of the Clovis people, the ancestors of Native Americans, during the last ice age.
Though the young child was still nursing at the time of its death, researchers adjusted the isotope analysis to allow for this. It meant they could figure out the mother’s diet by looking at the isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the child’s remains.
They then compared those values to the values of other species from the same region and period. The mother’s diet was similar to that of a Scimitar Cat, a relative of saber-tooth cats, also a mammoth eater.
A trio of woolly mammoths. Illustration: Shutterstock
One-third of their diets
Mammoths may seem like an unlikely food source for early people due to their size, but the analysis proved they were the number one choice at the time. Approximately 35% of the mother’s diet consisted of mammoth — by far the most abundant item in her diet. In fact, large mammals made up 96% of what she ate. Elk, bison ,and an extinct species of camel also featured heavily. She did eat plants and smaller animals, but they were minor by comparison.
The diet of the Clovis people has always been somewhat mysterious. We know that they hunted large game, including mammoths, because weapons and mammoth remains have often turned up at archaeological sites. Despite this, many have assumed that mammoths were a small part of their diets, due to the difficulties of hunting them. Supposedly, they ate mainly smaller animals, fish, and plants.
The Clovis people were some of the earliest humans in North America. James Chatter, co-author of the study, says that this dependence on mammoths “helps explain how Clovis people could spread throughout North America and into South America in just a few hundred years.”
The Clovis often moved from place to place, as did their main prey, the mammoth. Their size would have made them a fantastic source of fat and protein for ancient Americans.
Speaking to Alaska Public Media, co-author Ben Potter explained, “These earliest Americans…focused on megafauna, and particularly mammoth, and that allowed [them] to be so successful.”
