This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: At the end of the last ice age, early humans crisscrossed the Americas following seasons, rivers and game, often with a trusty spear in hand. Nearly 13,000 years later, archaeologists are using those spearheads to study how America's first inhabitants understood risk.
Stone projectile points are among the few surviving traces of the Tennessee River Valley's earliest settlers, but the chipped stone weapons can indicate how humans adapted to unfamiliar environments, according to a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. "We're talking about Ice Age hunter-gatherers, people who looked and acted just like us and had the same needs that we do," said Jesse Tune, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi and director of its Center for Archaeological Research. "But they're living in a world that is dominated by mastodons, mammoths, giant sloths—all these animals that are totally unfamiliar to us today.
"What we're looking at—the points—is a tiny part of their life, but we're trying to see the rest of their behaviors through the lens of these spear points because that's what we have." Tune and Shane Miller, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama, studied some 500 spear points recovered from the Tennessee River Valley region to glean insights into the lives of the Clovis and Cumberland people. The Clovis people are thought to be among the earliest inhabitants of the Tennessee River Valley region, with the earliest evidence of the group dated to around 13,200 years ago. Being in a new landscape meant not knowing where to find resources such as chert, a type of sedimentary rock ideal for making weapons.
"How did they adapt to a place no one has ever been before?" Miller said. "We can't interview these people, so we have to look at the things they left behind. "There aren't that many archaeological sites for these people that we can dig, but what we have instead are lots and lots of points that people have found in this region." Tune and Miller found that the Clovis groups were more likely to resharpen spearheads, possibly signaling that they were concerned about managing their resources.
"We hang on to stuff today, but when we're talking about mobile hunter-gatherers, they had a different understanding and worldview when it came to personal possessions," Tune said. "Spear points were designed to be disposable objects, and that makes what the Clovis were doing interesting." By the time the Cumberland people came along several hundred years later, they inherited from their predecessors the knowledge of where chert deposits and other resources were located. "When we look at the Cumberland points, we can see where they got the raw material, roughly the time period that they lived and that they've used the point multiple times," Tune said.
"But (the point) was rarely completely broken to the point that it couldn't be used anymore. "So how did it end up in what was essentially the trash, and then in the archaeological record?" Being more knowledgeable about the landscape allowed the Cumberland people to discard points that were still usable, evidence that they had learned where to gather new resources and were more comfortable in their surroundings, the researchers said. "When you think about a people who are moving around a lot, understand that they didn't have any pack animals," Miller said.
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