Clovis Culture - Disappearance of Clovis

Disappearance of Clovis

The most commonly held perspective on the end of the Clovis culture is that a decline in the availability of megafauna, combined with an overall increase in a less mobile population, led to local differentiation of lithic and cultural traditions across the Americas. After this time, Clovis-style fluted points were replaced by other fluted-point traditions (such as the Folsom culture) with an essentially uninterrupted sequence across North and Central America. An effectively continuous cultural adaptation proceeds from the Clovis period through the ensuing Middle and Late Paleoindian periods. It has also been argued that Clovis ended in a very abrupt fashion.

Whether the Clovis culture drove the mammoth, and other species, to extinction via overhunting – the so-called Pleistocene overkill hypothesis – is still an open, and controversial, question. It has also been hypothesized that the Clovis culture saw its decline in the wake of the Younger Dryas cold phase. This 'cold shock', lasting roughly 1,500 years, affected many parts of the world, including North America. It appears to have been triggered by a vast meltwater lake – Lake Agassiz – emptying into the North Atlantic, disrupting the thermohaline circulation.

The largely discredited Younger Dryas impact hypothesis suggests that one or more bolide impacts caused the mass extinction and triggered a period of climatic cooling. The hypothesis proposed that an extraterrestrial object such as a comet exploded in Earth's atmosphere above North America's Great Lakes region about 12,900 years ago, and significantly impacted the human Clovis culture. Recent published research disputes the quality of the evidence of an extraterrestrial impact. Additional possible evidence of comet impact is occurrence of microdiamonds and black mats in a layer of sedimentary rocks of that era, but those observations were not repeated in other analyses, the dates of the layer were disputed, and there was a lack of other supporting evidence, especially the dates and level of megafaunal extinction.