Source: Popular Mechanics
I know this has been posted on recently, but this article seems to have more info, and I like the photo :D ![]()
(Photograph by Glenn J. Asakawa/University of Colorado)
Last May, when Patrick Mahaffy was digging in his yard in Boulder, Colo., his shovel struck archaeological gold—a cache of 83 shaped stones that turned out to be prehistoric tools. The tools dates back 13,000 years to the prehistoric Clovis people, according to Douglas Bamforth, a University of Colorado professor who spent nine months testing and studying the tools. Bamforth presented the find to an archaeological conference in the fall. (He announced the find to the general public last month.) His team used protein residue analysis to identify materials from camels and horses, creatures that disappeared from the American continent at the end of the last ice age. Bamforth's team dated the tools back to the Clovis people, who archaeologists believe were the first or among the first people to cross the Bering Land Bridge and occupy North America. According to Bamforth these early Americans weren't just wandering souls—the Boulder find is further evidence, like the cache of Clovis spear points in East Wenatchee, Wash., that they might have been America's first toolmakers too.
The gems of the Boulder cache are bifacial knives, carefully crafted, with two sharp edges. Others pieces are shards that probably broke off while people were carving those knives, he says, but whose sharp edges made them useful for finer cuts. Bamforth told PM that Clovis people would have used spearheads to slaughter the megafauna—like the woolly mammoth—that roamed ancient America; these knives were for butchering the animals. "They're not weapons," he says. "They're processing tools."
The Clovis tools display remarkable craftsmanship. One of the oddest pieces of the bunch looks to be a double-sided axe—but with no place for a handle. Bamforth says that if you hold the axe by its middle, it feels balanced and useful as is. The majority of the Boulder knives are made from a sedimentary rock called tiger chert, which Clovis people would have been able to sculpt in several ways. Earlier peoples would have used a hard material like quartzite to hammer the chert into the correct shape, he says. But later on, more sophisticated toolmakers of the era learned to use materials such as antlers to make gentler changes of shape.
One mystery surrounding the Clovis people is that after going to all the trouble to make these tools, they often bury them together in the ground. One of the team's initial hypotheses was ritual. Previous Clovis sites have turned up giant spearheads far too large for a person to use during a hunt, Bamforth says, but these Colorado tools are more pragmatically sized. His hypothesis for the burial is insurance—people hid their tools in the ground so they could find them later if they followed a herd of animals back to the same area. David Kilby, an anthropology professor and Clovis expert from Eastern New Mexico University, told PM that he agreed with Bamforth's interpretation. "Stone is essential for hunter-gatherers who don't use metal," Kilby says. "To be caught without it is to be caught in a bad position."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/science_news/4307990.html
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