Origins of Paleoindians - The Paleoindians

The Paleoindians

The Wisconsin ice sheet that covered Canada was almost 2 miles thick and blocked any movement through the interior by Paleo-Arctic dwellers. By 12,000, it had broken up into two smaller ice sheets—the Cordilleran and the Laurentide. This formed the McKenzie corridor--an ice-free passage from Alaska to the Montana-North Dakota border. Paleo-Arctic populations that remained on the Arctic coast were generally more adept at hunting sea mammals and fishing than those who pursued caribou, mammoths, and other terrestrial mammals into the interior once the McKenzie corridor opened .

"Paleoindians are thought to have lived primarily as small, mobile groups of big game hunters."

Paleoindians travelled light and moved frequently—they were always moving to find new sources of plant foods and wild game. They did not carry much food and their tool kit of microblades was easily transported. Their diet was often sustaining and rich in protein due to successful hunting.

A highly mobile people such as the Paleoindians, probably had a surprisingly high reproductive rate. Travelling light during frequent moves was a more efficient utilization of calories than hunting and foraging further and further away from more permanent encampments. Paleoindians could carry more and provide for more children on the move than if they had built permanent settlements. In the bottleneck of Middle America, their birth rate decreased when "new" hunting grounds were found already populated by other bands. This slowed their progress and allowed the higher costs of more permanent residence to accumulate .

The Paleoindians may have moved every 3–4 days and covered 150 to 200 miles a year . A thin population of humans spread over both Americas by 11,000 when the Clovis culture appeared in the Southwest. Paleoindians are generally associated with Clovis spearpoints that were hafted to darts and hurled from atlatls at the last mammoths on earth. Clovis culture was gone in 300 years but the stage had been set for the appearance of the earliest American Archaic Indians .