Although the contemporary Paleo Diet is trendy, there’s long been anthropological debate about what early man actually ate. Mostly fruit and berries, gathered from foraging? Small game? Or massive mammals?
“That’s been quite a controversy in the last decade or so,” says James Chatters of McMaster University. Chatters and colleagues have attempted to end this debate with a report in Science Advances that says North American people 13,000 years ago dined primarily on large mammals — with mammoth meat as their primary food source.
The report has implications beyond just food choice. What the Clovis people (named for their use of a particular kind of spear head) dined on says much about how they organized their lives.
Paleo Diet Debate Ended?
If the always mobile mammoths were the Clovis peoples’ primary food source, they would need to follow the beasts as they lumbered from one part of North America to another. Archeological evidence has already suggested that the Clovis people lived a nomadic existence.
They left evidence of a series of campsites, scattered in unpredictable patterns. Physical belongings left behind tended to be minimal, emphasizing their need to travel light.
“They are not going to have a lot of baggage,” says Chatter. “They are not going to create things that take weeks or months to make.”
Read More: A 13,000-Year-Old Camp Site Reveals Hunting Patterns from Ancient Humans
Big Evidence for Big Game
The archeological record also leaned heavily toward big game hunting. The Clovis people left behind large spearpoints — which would be overkill for bagging small game. They also discarded heavy spear shafts made of bone or wood — again more consistent with big game than smaller targets. And the size and type of abandoned tools indicated they were likely used to butcher large animals.
But this evidence for big game as a primary food source for the Clovis people was all indirect. That has now changed. The research group conducted biomarker analysis on a mother’s bones. They found that about 40 percent of her diet came from mammoth, with elk a distant second, followed by bison. Small mammals evidently played a minor role in her diet.
The confirmation of mammoth as a staple wasn’t surprising, says Chatters — but the level of elk apparent in the diet was. Elk were relatively new arrivals in North America at the time. Chatters also stresses that the levels of each kind of animal in the woman’s diet may be on the lower side.
“In doing this analysis, when there was a decision point to use this number or that number, we always chose the number that was more conservative,” says Chatters.
Read More: Early Humans Didn't Follow A Diet, They Ate For Survival
Tracking Mammoths and Extinction
Establishing directly that large mammals — what the researcher call megafauna — were Clovis peoples’ primary food sources holds some important implications, says Ben Potter, a University of Alaska archeologist and co-author of the paper. Tracking the large mammals’ paths helps better understand the Cloves peoples’ migration pattern. They essentially said “follow the mammoth!” says Potter.
Tracking both humans and mammoths may better help explain the large, hairy tusked animals’ extinction. Warming may have restricted their habitat. That in turn made the beasts more susceptible to over-hunting. But no one can yet establish that either warming or hunting alone killed off the beasts. Those were likely two factors of a complex mix of many.
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Science Advances. Mammoth featured heavily in Western Clovis diet
Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.
