An Ice Age Infant’s Bones Reveal Early Americans Ate Woolly Mammoths as a Protein Staple

When Earth was frozen over during the Pleistocene epoch, early humans crossed the Bering Strait from the Asian continent to North America. These groups, known as the Clovis people, entered the continent around 13,000 years ago and became the ancestors of Indigenous Americans. During their heyday in the Ice Age, they enjoyed a bounty of game among the megafauna that were unaccustomed to humans, a novel kind of predator. Now, new research points to a preferred food source of these early humans: woolly mammoth protein.

“The focus on mammoths helps explain how Clovis people could spread throughout North America and into South America in just a few hundred years,” study co-author James Chatters, an archaeologist at McMaster University in Canada, says in a statement.

The eating habits of prehistoric humans have long been a source of debate. Some researchers suggested these Ice Age individuals were indiscriminate foragers of plants, small animals and even fish. Other researchers contended that these communities hunted for larger game. But with only animal bones and age-worn tools for archaeologists to work with, any claims on the food culture of these ancient settlers were usually more speculative than conclusive.

Now, in a study published last week in the journal Science Advances, a team of researchers from the U.S. and Canada presents new, direct evidence that suggests Clovis humans took down megafauna. Consulting with the Indigenous tribes in Montana and Wyoming, the scientists looked at the chemical composition of the remains of the only known Clovis individual, an 18-month-old boy. Other researchers had previously unearthed the child’s remains in southwestern Montana and named him Anzick-1.

To study his diet while he lived, the researchers analyzed the isotopic makeup of his bone. Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have different masses, and they record the lifestyle of an organism. The isotopes in bone are stronly influenced by what an individual eats and drinks.

By measuring the distribution of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the child’s tissues, the study authors then compared the profile to other animals that roamed during that time. A match would indicate that the boy grew up consuming that protein source.

At barely two years of age, the child understandably consumed solid foods only one-third of the time; most of his nutritional needs came from his mother’s milk. But the fact that he nursed allowed scientists to also infer the mother’s food patterns from Anzick-1’s remains. From the same bone analyses, the researchers extrapolated that mammoth meat made up 40 percent of the mother’s diet. Other large animals, such as elk and bison, made up most of the rest of her diet, and small mammals, such as rodents, featured negligibly in the mother’s food intake.

From this dietary profile, the researchers claim that Anzick-1’s mother likely ate a diet that resembled the menu for the scimitar cat of the Pleistocene, which itself was known to be a mammoth specialist predator.

Mammoth, in the Clovis era, was likely a food staple rather than an occasional treat, the researchers say. The chemical evidence in Anzick-1’s bone comes from gradual accumulation as his tissues developed, which implies the Clovis adults had been noshing on mammoth meat for a while, likely over a year at least, the authors estimate.

“This is not just a single site with a single meal of mammoth,” study co-author Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, tells Anna Gibbs of Science News. “This is a tradition of the people.”

The findings are consistent with existing preliminary evidence that prehistoric humans had a penchant for mammoth flesh. The Clovis people were known to brandish an array of pointy stone tools that archaeologists have inferred to be hunting weapons. Archaeological evidence also shows that the Clovis people lived life on the move, as did the mammoths, which tended to migrate seasonally, according to the paper. Following the migration patterns of mammoths might have led these early Americans to spread across the continent.

Megafauna seem to have disappeared around the end of the Pleistocene, after humans’ Asia-to-America migration. How much were humans to blame for driving these beasts to extinction? In the past, researchers have pinned culpability on the rapidly warming climate, arguing that Pleistocene beasts were unable to adapt as the world climbed out of an ice age. But in the 1960s, doubt began to impinge on this theory, reports the New York Times’ Carl Zimmer. Many of the same creatures had survived previous ice ages, so why not this one? The new research demonstrates that humans might have played a role in these extinctions through hunting.

Still, some scientists are skeptical of how far one person’s diet can illuminate the broader culture of an entire civilization.

“The most problematic aspect of the paper is the speed with which it races from a single data point in Montana to humans playing a role in megafaunal extinctions hemisphere-wide,” David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University who was not involved in the work, tells the New York Times.

And while the findings are a “big deal,” as anthropologist Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona, who did not participate in the research, tells Science News, “I don’t know how you could ever test them unless you found more human remains.”

Shi En Kim | | READ MORE

Shi En Kim is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance science journalist. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, the Atlantic, Popular Science and others. In 2021, she interned at Smithsonian magazine as an AAAS Mass Media Fellow.