Me Ug, You Grog
by Kristie "Ug" Erickson, Special Project Curator

Life among the leviathans of the Ice Age was not as nasty, brutish, and short as some think. At least, not all the time.

During the last glacial period, much of the earth’s water was locked up in terrestrial ice. As a result, the sea level was lower than today’s, exposing land now underwater, most famously in Beringia. Large herds of animals passed freely from Asia to the Americas across this ancient stretch of grassland, followed by hunter-gatherer people who relied on them for food. Today called the Clovis people, they first arrived in North America between 14,000 and12,000 years ago and are predominantly considered the first Americans. Around 11,000 years ago the warming climate raised sea levels enough to separate the two continents, thereby cutting off the inhabitants from one another. The retreating glaciers also opened up access to the rest of the continent, and the Clovis people spread across the Americas, living off the most abundant resource of the time – large game.

Today, we know the Clovis people only from durable goods left behind, like bones and stone tools, but much can be inferred about their lifestyle. They wore animal skins for warmth and took shelter in caves and temporary dwellings of hide, wood, or even bone. They had a highly developed language and social culture, and possibly art, music, or even pets. Though no Clovis art has been found in North America, examples exist in contemporaneous peoples across Europe and Asia, and dogs had been domesticated elsewhere 20,000 years previously.

Archaeological sites show the Clovis people hunted mammoths and mastodons, although these large and fearsome animals were dangerous. According to Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Museum, "any one group of Clovis people probably killed one mammoth in their lifetime, and then talked about it for the next 50 years." They probably subsisted on smaller animals such as horses, camels, and giant bison, as well fruits and plants.

The Clovis people spread rapidly across North America and disappeared equally rapidly – no evidence of them exists after about 10,900 years ago. Their decline was probably due to the extinction of the herds of the steppes, their main source of food. Several theories exist on the cause of this extinction, including climate change, over-hunting, disease, and even an extraterrestrial impact somewhere near Lake Michigan. These pressures would have pushed the Clovis people to invent new technology for smaller game, seen in the later Folsom tradition.

The Clovis people adapted perfectly to a world where ice towered up to the clouds and giants roamed the earth, and when that world abruptly vanished they adapted yet again. Today our astonishing inventions allow us to survive in such extreme environments as outer space and the bottom of the ocean – and we have foundations established by the Clovis people to thank for it.