Scientists have found fragments a human-made projectile point in a rib of an American mastodon (Mammut americanum) from the Manis site, Washington, the United States. The projectile point is about 13,900 years old and is morphologically different from later cylindrical points of the 13,000-year-old Clovis culture. The artifact, which is made of mastodon bone, shows that people predating Clovis made and used osseous weapons to hunt megafauna in the Pacific Northwest.
In the 1970s, archaeologists excavated a single male mastodon from sediments at the base of a kettle pond at the Manis site, Washington.
No stone tools were found at the site, but human interaction with the mastodon was suggested by bones with spiral fractures, flakes removed from a long bone, and bones with cut marks.
In addition, the end of a mastodon’s right rib had foreign fragments embedded in it.
Those foreign pieces were interpreted to be the tip of a projectile point that broke apart as it impacted and entered the rib.
In the new study, Texas A&M University’s Professor Michael Waters and colleagues used high-resolution micro-CT scans and 3D software to study those foreign pieces.
They isolated all the fragments to show it was the tip of a human-made projectile point (34.5 mm long, 16.9 mm wide, and 5.8 mm thick).
According to the team, the fragments became embedded in the rib when the mastodon was alive, as indicated by the visible healing around the site of the wound.
The genetic study showed that the bone fragments embedded in the rib are from a mastodon.
“We isolated the bone fragments, printed them out and assembled them,” Professor Waters said.
“This clearly showed this was the tip of a bone projectile point. This is this the oldest bone projectile point in the Americas and represents the oldest direct evidence of mastodon hunting in the Americas.”
“At 13,900 years old, the Manis point is 900 years older than projectile points found to be associated with the Clovis…
Read the full article here