Washington: In a groundbreaking study, scientists have uncovered the first direct evidence of the diet of ancient humans who roamed North America during the last Ice Age.
The research reveals that mammoths were a primary food source for these early settlers, with a focus on megafauna, including mammoths, elk, and bison, making up nearly all of their diet.
The breakthrough came through the analysis of chemical clues in the bones of an 18-month-old boy, found in southern Montana. The child, known as the Anzick Boy, was still nursing at the time of death, and the chemical signatures in his bones provided a snapshot of his mother’s diet.
Since the child’s diet would have been largely influenced by his mother’s breast milk, the study offers a glimpse into the food consumed by the people of the Clovis culture, who lived around 12,800 years ago.
Researchers found that the mother’s diet was predominantly composed of meat from megafauna, with mammoths accounting for about 40 percent of her total diet. The remaining 56 percent consisted of other large animals, such as elk, bison, camels, and horses. Small mammals and plants contributed very little. The study highlights how these ancient people focused on hunting the largest prey available, which provided substantial quantities of meat and fat for their communities.
“Megafauna, particularly the immense Columbian mammoths, provided huge packages of meat and energy-rich fat. One animal could sustain an entire group of people for days or even weeks,” said James Chatters, an archeologist at Applied Paleoscience and co-lead author of the study.
The findings offer further insight into the subsistence strategies of the Clovis people, who were highly skilled hunters. These nomadic groups, thought to have crossed a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, are associated with large stone spear points and tools designed for hunting megafauna.
The new evidence reinforces the idea that the Clovis people were not foragers, as some once believed, but instead relied heavily on hunting large animals like mammoths.
Ben Potter, co-lead author and archeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, explained that, “These results help us understand megafaunal extinctions at the end of the Ice Age, indicating humans may have played a more significant role in these extinctions than previously thought.”
As the Ice Age came to an end, the warming climate and changing environments began reducing the habitats of mammoths and other megafauna. These animals, previously accustomed to threats from predators like saber-toothed cats, were unprepared for the hunting tactics of human groups.
To decode the ancient diet, scientists employed stable isotope analysis, a method that tracks the chemical signatures of carbon and nitrogen, which are incorporated into an individual’s tissues based on the foods they consume.
The study confirms earlier archeological findings that Clovis artifacts are most often associated with the bones of megafauna.
This discovery not only sheds new light on the diets of Ice Age humans but also adds to the growing body of evidence about the interactions between early humans and the megafauna that once dominated the North American landscape.
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