The ice age ended because of changes in the earth’s climate. Environments once rich in lush green life began to disappear. The reason for the disappearance of the great beasts of the ice age is still debated among scientists. More than likely, it was the combination of both the changes in climate and the overhunting by skilled people. [National Park Service]
A Clovis site in Alaska dated to about 12,400 years ago has led most archaeologists to believe the culture arose only after their arrival to North America.
Exploiting the gap between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets during the Wisconsin Glacial Episode those Clovis People were the first humans to see the Missouri Buttes and Mahto Tipila in Wyoming. The Clovis culture thrived on the high plains and in the Black Hills before settling the rest of the Mississippi basin but those pioneers had already explored parts of Montana long before they found Clovis, New Mexico where their stone tools were unearthed in the 1920s. Before US 14 was widened a team led by Adrien Hannus from Augustana University uncovered evidence of human habitation from over 12,000 years ago in a cave in Boulder Canyon near Sturgis, South Dakota.
At one excavation site in Wyoming evidence revealed that humans killed a mammoth with a Clovis pointed spear launched from an atlatl, a type of throwing stick.
...he also radiocarbon-dated the humerus of the mammoth, which places the animal’s life (12,694 to 12,863 years ago and within 100 years of the LaPrele mammoth) during the Clovis period and right in the time frame that humans could have killed it. [University of Wyoming]
I believe the ancestors of the Chacoans came up the Columbia and the Snake Rivers then into ancient Lake Bonneville and down the western slope of the Rocky Mountains into the Four Corners Region. At the southern terminus of the Rockies near Santa Fe interaction with the Clovis culture seems perfectly likely.
It’s easy to see how seafaring people might have reached Cooper’s Ferry, says Loren Davis, an archaeologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis who led the excavations. Although the site is more than 500 kilometers from the coast, the Salmon, Snake, and Columbia rivers link it to the sea. [First people in the Americas came by sea, ancient tools unearthed by Idaho river suggest]
Note river path in remnants of Yellowstone Caldera. Red Rock Pass: Spillway Bonneville Flood http://t.co/DS5rpN9cOu http://t.co/XryyTX4ATw— interested party (@larry_kurtz) October 1, 2013
Bonneville Flood-Lake Bonneville Red Rock Pass Snake River Canyon http://t.co/8tejI4PokG— interested party (@larry_kurtz) October 1, 2013
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Update, footprints at White Sands are now believed to be 23,000 years old: source
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