ON A HOT DAY IN THE SUMMER OF 1986, as winds whipped through the low grasses of the Wyoming prairie, two men from the town of Douglas stared in disbelief at the ground below them. They saw an exceptionally large bone jutting out of the steep bank of La Prele Creek. While walking the banks of the creek outside town, it was not uncommon to find the odd cattle or sheep skeleton eroding out of the soil, but this was something different. This bone was extremely weathered and deeply buried, like nothing the two men had seen before. They would later learn that the bone belonged to a woolly mammoth that lived some 13,000 years ago, at the same time as people of a culture known today as Clovis. Now, almost 40 years later, the bones of the La Prele mammoth are helping archaeologists understand how these people became some of the earliest to explore the Americas.
The Clovis people were hunter-gatherers who lived in North America from about 13,100 to 12,700 years ago. They used a particular type of projectile point known as Clovis points for their discovery in Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s. These tools are characterized by flutes, or grooves, that run lengthwise along the flat sides of the point. Archaeologists long considered Clovis people to have been the first humans to have arrived in North America from Siberia. But in recent decades researchers have identified a number of sites suggesting that humans may have reached North America well before the Clovis culture spread across the continent. These include Paisley Cave in Oregon, which has been dated to 14,300 years ago,
