Prehistoric inhabitants of North America were expert mammoth hunters and based their diet on the massive beast, new research suggests, upending assumptions that they mainly hunted small game. The findings emerged from the bones of an 18-month-old boy who lived nearly 13,000 years ago in what is now Montana. Researchers used isotopic data on the boy, who was likely breastfeeding, to present a model of his mother's diet. "Isotopes provide a chemical fingerprint of a consumer's diet and can be compared with those from potential diet items to estimate the proportional contribution of different diet items," explains Mat Wooller of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, an author of the study published Wednesday in Science Advances.
Comparing the mother's stable isotopic fingerprint to ancient food sources from the region, researchers determined the largest contributor to her diet (40%) was mammoth, followed by elk, bison, and camel, per Live Science. "The contribution of small mammals was negligible," according to the study, which found the mother's diet was "closest to that of [the now-extinct] scimitar cat, a mammoth specialist." This focus on mammoths "helps explain how [the] Clovis people could spread throughout North America and into South America in just a few hundred years," co-lead author James Chatters of McMaster University says in a release.
Whereas smaller game could vary widely from region to region, mammoths lived across the Americas and migrated long distances, making them a reliable source of fat and protein for the so-called Clovis people, who were "highly mobile," says co-lead author Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "What's striking to me is that this confirms a lot of data from other sites," he adds, pointing to the bones of megafauna and "efficient distance weapons." However, this focus on mammoths may have caused populations to shrink to the point that only isolated groups of the animals remained by about 10,000 years ago. (More archaeology stories.)
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