Clovis at the end of the world

Of the scores of North American archaeological sites claimed to provide evidence of human hunting of now-extinct Pleistocene mammals, only about a dozen have compelling evidence of such predation. In all instances, the animals involved were mammoth and mastodon (1). In PNAS, Sanchez et al. (2) contend that a third genus of proboscidean (elephants and their near relatives), the gomphothere Cuvieronius, should be added to the small list of large mammals pursued by Clovis hunters. It is an intriguing claim; skeptics, however, might require more proof than is currently available. The investigations of Sanchez et al. at the aptly named site of El Fin del Mundo, situated in a remote region of Mexico’s Sonoran Desert (Fig. 1), are noteworthy in several respects. The work documents a genus that has rarely been reported from the late Pleistocene fossil record of North America; it shows an apparent association of the gomphotheres (two subadults found several meters apart in locality 1) with Clovis artifacts; it is one of the very few cases in which there is an associated camp; and it is among the earliest of radiocarbon-dated Clovis sites. As rare as sites of this age are and as distinctive as El Fin del Mundo is, it will surely figure prominently in subsequent discussions of Clovis culture. For that matter, it will likely also be marshalled into several ongoing debates regarding Clovis origins and adaptations. Which way its evidence will lean depends, as it so often does, on how to interpret incomplete and sometimes ambiguous archaeological data and what may yet come from this important site. Excavations in locality 1 at El Fin del Mundo, January 2011. As Sanchez et al. described in their SI Appendix (2), locality 1 was originally on the floor of a wetland basin, but subsequent erosion left …