2015/03/23 by Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford, Brian Kooyman +1 · 106 citations
Social Sciences · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Wildlife Ecology and Conservation #Megafauna #Radiocarbon dating #Pleistocene #Archaeology #Mammoth #Prehistory #Geochronology #Geography #Chronology #Geology #Paleontology
paper · doi:10.1073/pnas.1420650112
published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(14), 4263-4267 (National Academy of Sciences)
openalex publication_date 2015/03/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The only certain evidence for prehistoric human hunting of horse and camel in North America occurs at the Wally's Beach site, Canada. Here, the butchered remains of seven horses and one camel are associated with 29 nondiagnostic lithic artifacts. Twenty-seven new radiocarbon ages on the bones of these animals revise the age of these kill and butchering localities to 13,300 calibrated y B.P. The tight chronological clustering of the eight kill localities at Wally's Beach indicates these animals were killed over a short period. Human hunting of horse and camel in Canada, coupled with mammoth, mastodon, sloth, and gomphothere hunting documented at other sites from 14,800-12,700 calibrated y B.P., show that 6 of the 36 genera of megafauna that went extinct by approximately 12,700 calibrated y B.P. were hunted by humans. This study shows the importance of accurate geochronology, without which significant discoveries will go unrecognized and the empirical data used to build models explaining the peopling of the Americas and Pleistocene extinctions will be in error.