The Clovis culture is an archaeological culture from the Paleoindian period of North America, spanning around 13, to 12, years Before Present BP. These points were multifunctional, also serving as cutting tools. Other stone tools used by the Clovis culture include knives, scrapers , and bifacial tools, with bone tools including beveled rods and shaft wrenches, with possible ivory points also being identified.
Hides, wood, and natural fibers may also have been utilized, though no direct evidence of this has been preserved. Clovis artifacts are often found grouped together in caches where they had been stored for later retrieval, and over 20 Clovis caches have been identified.
The Clovis peoples are thought to have been highly mobile groups of hunter-gatherers. The Clovis culture represents the earliest widely recognised archaeological culture in North America [ 14 ] though in western North America, it appears to have been contemporaneous with the Western Stemmed Tradition. While historically, many scholars held to a "Clovis first" model, where Clovis represented the earliest inhabitants in the Americas, today this is largely rejected, with several generally accepted sites across the Americas like Monte Verde II being dated to at least a thousand years earlier than the oldest Clovis sites.
The end of the Clovis culture may have been driven by the decline of the megafauna that the Clovis hunted as well as decreasing mobility, resulting in local differentiation of lithic and cultural traditions across North America.
In South America, the widespread similar Fishtail or Fell point style was contemporaneous to the usage of Clovis points in North America [ 1 ] [ 22 ] and possibly developed from Clovis points. On August 29, , the first evidence of Pleistocene humans seen by multiple archaeologists in the Americas was discovered near Folsom, New Mexico.
