Sites in the Americas with Possible or Probable Evidence for the Butchering of Proboscideans

ABSTRACT

Proboscideans may have been important prey for Pleistocene foragers in the Americas. Dozens of proboscidean sites have been claimed to show evidence of human involvement dating to MIS 3 or in a few cases even earlier. Summaries are provided here for >70 sites. Also presented are discussions of patterns and variability in the claims. Suggestive traces of human use of carcasses such as associated stone tools or butchering marks vary from few or none in the oldest sites to relatively many in the latest (Clovis-era) sites. Evidence to distinguish scavenging from killing is not clear in most cases, but cut marks on bones in a few sites indicate that fully fleshed carcasses were butchered before carnivores stripped meat. Only one assemblage contains a bone with a possible weapon tip fragment embedded in it, a kind of find that is also rare in Eurasian mammoth sites. The oldest sites in the Americas are notably different from Old World assemblages, including those dating >1 Ma.

KEYWORDS:

• Proboscideans
• butchering
• kill sites
• Americas
• Pre-Clovis

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the late Dennis Stanford, who adopted me into his fold of researchers and sent me off to Africa to study elephants as possible models for America’s extinct proboscideans. I also thank the late Paul S. Martin, who led me with tact and indulgence through the intricacies of proboscidean extinction, the late Frank Whitmore, who showed me ways to examine mammoth bones and teeth, and the late Larry Agenbroad, who offered handy counsel for thinking about mammoth ecology. I am also grateful to other generous and helpful colleagues who are still around, especially Jeffrey Saunders and C. Vance Haynes, Jr. for facilitating my examinations of proboscidean bones over the years. I thank Kurt Hallin of the Milwaukee Public Museum, Ned Gilmore of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, Russ Graham and Steve Holen, both formerly at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, and Carol Allison of the University of Alaska. Early funding for my field and museum studies came from the Anthropology Department Paleoindian Program at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (a pre-doctoral Fellowship and contracts SF105861000, SF2012770000, SF2052510000, and SF3035060000) and the University of Nevada-Reno Foundation. Later studies such as this paper's literature reviews have been self-funded. I am grateful to Todd Surovell, Vance Haynes, and an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions to improve this paper. Most of all I thank my wife Janis Klimowicz for her forbearance and essential assistance in all aspects of the work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Surovell and Waguespack compared numbers of proboscidean kill/butchering sites in North Americas with kill/butchering sites in the Old World.

2 Which has been spelled more than one way; see Table 1.

3 These age ranges are not universally accepted; e.g., Waters and Stafford (2007) asserted that the most reliable time span is ∼13,200–12,800 cal yr BP; Waters et al. (2020) updated the preferred dates to 13,050–12,750 cal yr BP.

4 This analysis examined 25 single carcass kill/scavenging components or sites and did not include the Old World sites with dwelling structures or dump areas containing bones from dozens of mammoths.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gary Haynes

Gary Haynes is Foundation Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has published extensively on North America’s early archeological sites, neo-taphonomic studies of African elephants, Gravettian mammoth-hunting in central Europe, and the Holocene prehistory of Zimbabwe.