The people referred to by North American archaeologists as the Paleo-Indians, or “ancient Indians,” perhaps exhibit the first evidence of projectile-point poisoning by Native Americans. Precisely when these first Americans entered the New World and where they originated continues to be hotly debated.1
The most widely accepted notion, however, is that the ancestors of the American Indians migrated from northeast Asia in small hunting and foraging bands more than 12,000 years ago by way of a land bridge that was exposed between Siberia and Alaska during the last glaciations. A minority of archaeologists champion northern and western Europe as one of the possible origin points whereas traditional Native Americans claim that they evolved in the New World.
Those who tout the Bering Strait land-bridge route—and most do—should consider that the strait can be crossed during winter when the water freezes over. Only fifty-five miles separates Siberia from Alaska at the narrowest point, and today a cottage industry on the Alaskan side equips and supports daredevil expeditions that have made the trek on everything from snowmobiles to jeeps to skis. In 1998 Russian Arctic explorer Dimitry Shaparov and his son Matvey encountered polar bears on their twenty-one-day journey on skis. Some decades back, another Russian expedition was air-lifted off the ice when twenty polar bears surrounded them. The presence of polar bears indicates that a large carnivore can find sufficient food for sustenance through an arctic winter, and it is supposed that human hunters could do likewise.
Agreement as to the precise time of the initial peopling of the New World is limited. The Tlapacoya site in Mexico has been dated between 24,000 and 21,000 years ago whereas the La Sena mammoth kill site in Nebraska contained 18,000-year-old bone collagen. The Cactus Hill site in Virginia revealed charcoal dated to more than 15,000 years ago. A persuasive new discovery, the Monte Verde site in Chile, has shown dates reaching back 12,500 years. Nevertheless, the essential debate continues.
Somewhat later than the dating of Monte Verde, unique fluted stone points in association with the remains of several species of mammoth were found at kill sites clustered on the southern plains of North America (Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma) dating 11,500 to 10,900 years ago. Archaeologists refer to the Paleo-Indians responsible for these sites as the Clovis, after a New Mexico town near which the first materials were found.
The signature of the Clovis tradition is a projectile, or spear point, presumed to have been used in elephant hunting. The classic Clovis point is leaf-shaped with a channel, groove, or flute on one or both sides running from its base to about a third or half way to the tip. The points range in size from a little over one to five inches. The antiquity of these points, their origin, their function, and their manner of use are unknown. Some experts have suggested that the fluting provided a better “tongue-and-groove” fit for attaching the point to its shaft. The flute has been considered a “blood groove” to stimulate blood loss in the animal attacked while some have argued that the fluting lightened the weight of the stone point. Others have even imagined that they knew exactly how far up the point the string hafting material reached. Nonetheless, all is pure supposition, for the great age of the Clovis tradition precludes records of anyone having seen mammoth hunters in action with their fluted points.
The assumption that small groups of Clovis hunters attacked and killed the Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi), the Jefferson mammoth (Mammuthus jeffersonii), the American mastodon (Mammut americanum), or the wooly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) with stone-tipped spears is problematic, though undeniable. The American mastodon stood eight to ten feet at the shoulder and weighed four to six tons. The Columbian mammoth was even larger, measuring twelve to fourteen feet at the shoulder and weighing eight to ten tons. The Wooly mammoth, larger still, averaged nine feet at the shoulder, weighed seven to nine tons, and was covered with guard hair as long as ninety centimeters. Add to this the thickness of the hide and fat and the massive bones needed to support such a tremendous weight, and these must have been intimidating animals for the Clovis hunters to confront. The contemporary Asian elephant, in contrast, stands six and a half to eleven and a half feet at the shoulder and weighs three to five tons whereas the African elephant measures ten to thirteen feet at the shoulder and weighs four to seven tons.
It is important to keep in mind the relative size difference between Clovis hunters and their mammoth and mastodon prey. A hunter who stood just under six feet (a generous estimate of Paleo-Indian stature) would reach only the mammoth’s knee. The fluted points (several inches in length) with which they armed their spears would be mere splinters in the mass of these animals, perhaps equivalent to a pinprick on a human.
The mammoth’s tusks and trunk also must be considered when imagining Paleo-Indians attacking a Columbian mammoth, for example. Most assume that such an attack would have been waged primarily with thrusting spears, which would require the hunter to be in close proximity. With the animal’s trunk and tusks whipping from side to side, a trunk as big around as a man, and tusks as long as sixteen feet and as heavy as two hundred pounds each, however, the creature could effectively protect its throat and flanks from a human predator.
Another intriguing factor is that relatively few Clovis points have been discovered with the mammoths they killed. At the Dent site in Colorado, three Clovis points were found with twelve mammoths; at the Naco site in Arizona, eight were uncovered with one mammoth, four times the number found with any other mammoth. Typically only a few points accompany mammoth kills. It would seem, then, that if pure fire power with Clovis-point spears were killing the giant animals, many, many more points should be in evidence. Possibly the hunters recovered their points for further use or retrieved broken blades to be retooled into scrappers, cutting tools, or knife blades. Or, perhaps, they poisoned their points. When hunters in other parts of the world killed big game with poisoned weapons, they used very few points.
The Hunters, an anthropology film classic, is a documentary of a Kalahari Bushmen group and one of the few filmed demonstrations of big-game hunting with poisoned arrows. Early in the film, a hunter shoots a wildebeest with a small-tipped (about the size of a little-finger nail), unfletched arrow with poison painted just below the point. The animal is mortally wounded but harvested by lions before the hunter can track it. Later a similar arrow hits a giraffe, which the Bushmen track for several days. Too sick from the poison to flee the hunters, it stands while they hurl metal-bladed spears at its throat. The razor sharp spears either bounce off the thick hide or barely penetrate it and fall out. When the tip of one point enters the animal, it seems to have no effect. I have heard many anthropologists suggest that the filmmakers finally shot the beast rather than wait for the poison to finish its work as the Bushmen under normal circumstances would have done.
The Hunters makes several significant points. First, poison can kill large game animals. Second, it can be done with one small arrow. Even metal spear blades thrown at point-blank range have little or no effect on such a large animal, an animal that also is not fighting back.
It is possible that Paleo-Indian hunters who used fluted points against large game animals had poisons in their repertoire of hunting tools. Other observations support this assumption. Wherever contemporary “Stone Age” elephant hunters were found (predominantly Africa and India), they killed the animals with poisoned weapons, generally arrows. The Abor and Mishmis of India concocted a poison from several species of Aconitum, Croton, pig blood, cobra venom, and other unidentified toxic plants to slay elephants, tigers, and water buffalo. Their poison was effective on a two-and-a-half-ton elephant.
The Kung San of The Hunters fame killed big game in a matter of hours with poison from the Chrysomelid beetle. The Akoa Pygmy groups hunted elephants with arrows poisoned with Strychnos, Strophan-thus, Erythrophloeum, and various animal and insect remains. They could bring down a hippopotamus in twenty minutes with a single arrow. In the 1970s, the Wakamba, the major elephant poachers in Kenya, designed poison from the boiled branches and bark of the Acokanthera. It seems reasonable that, if every other elephant-hunting population in the world employed poisons against the beast, the Clovis people did the same.
Claims that the fluting so diagnostic of the Clovis people has not been found outside North America are refuted by the Ainu of Hokkaido, Japan, who featured fluting on one side of their bamboo arrowheads. (Clovis points were sometimes fluted on only one side.) The Ainu hunter rubbed a pea-sized ball of poison into the flute, flush with the arrowhead’s surface.
A criticism of one neither conversant with the bamboo found in Japan nor of the many ways it can be shaped and molded during and after the growing process might suggest that the Ainu fluted points were simply an accidental effect of splitting a hollow culm. However, a large species of bamboo, generally referred to as “lumber bamboo” by Westerners, can grow culm walls half an inch thick or more. Such bamboos are often shaped from their first emergence with a square dye composed of four planks tied around the culm from the ground to six feet or more up the new stalk. Much as binding splints of wood to a newborn’s head in cranial deformation, the bamboo binding will produce flat slabs, the edges of which can be sharpened to a knifelike keenness.
In 1985, archaeologists Maureen L. King of the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas and Sergei B. Slobodin of the Department of Education in Magadan, Russia, reported in Science magazine, their find of a Clovis-like fluted point at the Uptar site in northeastern Siberia. The point was dated in reference to a volcanic level found beneath the point at 8260 (plus or minus 330 years). A number of unfluted stone bifaces that resemble Clovis points in basic shape were found nearby.2
The design of the Clovis points precludes bringing down the mammoth with force, which would have required larger points like the harpoon points used against whales. Simply, they were too short and too fragile to be the sole killing force against a mammoth. The bone mass and massive muscles with which elephants move tons of body weight, combined with the constricted musculature of an animal under attack, would shatter the delicate fluted points in the animal, and perhaps this was intended. A number of early accounts indicate that some Indian groups designed poison arrowheads to shatter or disengage from the shaft within the victim’s body. Thirteen such fore shafts have been found at Clovis sites on the Wacissa and Aucilla Rivers in northern Florida.
The possible origin ofClovis populations also supports the poison-use hypothesis. No one knows for sure where the Clovis people came from, but experts presume northeast Asia, which suggests they traveled through arrow-poisoning cultures into the New World. For example, north of the Ainu, the native peoples of Kamchatka and the Kurile Island chain included Anemone virginiana (Virginia Wind Flower) and Anemone nemorosa (Scarlet Wind Flower) in poisons for war and big-game hunting. In northern China, arrow poisons, A. japonicum being the most prevalent, have been around for millennia. Numerous species of Aconi-tum grow in the mountains of China, and hunters and warriors of Yunnan and Guangxi used arrow poisons well into the twentieth century.
Further east, the people of the Aleutian Islands had poison weapons. Russian explorers document the presence of Aconitum in whale hunting by the Aleut, as well as the Kodiak Islanders, and report that a single thrust of a harpoon tainted with it could kill a whale. (Several decades ago, European whale hunters experimented with cyanide and other poisons in whale hunting.)
The most likely candidate for the major poison of the Paleo-Indian mammoth hunters is Aconitum spp., recorded in China, Mongolia, and Siberia—the probable origin of the Paleo-Indians. In the North Pacific area, such groups as the Aleut and the Kodiak hunted whales with it, a testimony to its lethality against large mammals.
Though Aconitum spp. favors moist, cool soil, remnant populations still grow in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, the area that supplies some of the earliest evidence of Paleo-Indian mammoth hunters. At the time of the Clovis tradition, the Great Plains and Southwest had the cool, damp conditions that Aconitum spp. prefers.
The ethnohistorical, ethnobotanical, and ethnological evidence— along with the limited number of points found at Clovis kill sites, the comparison with Stone Age elephant hunters worldwide, the arrow fluting of the Ainu, the flute point found at the Uptar site in Siberia, and the poison-laden cultural environment that must have been the seat of the Clovis tradition—suggests that the Clovis hunters used poisoned points, at least some of the time, to kill mammoths. No other explanation exists except that based on pure speculation.
It must be acknowledged that poisons were one of many ways big game was taken. Hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of the Paleo-Indians, Old World hunters (Homo erectus) drove animals into bogs and ravines and over cliffs with fire. Some African Pygmy populations rigged weighted elephant spears to fall with great force into the animals’ heads or backs. The fluted point should be considered a type of projectile point, not the be all and end all of the Clovis mammoth-killing arsenal. Poisons may not have been required for mammoth calves, elders, or injured individuals.
Around ii, ooo years ago, a major climatic change dried the moist savannahs where the Clovis hunters roamed. The temperature warmed, and the mammoth became extinct. So too did the Clovis tradition, which gave way to a similar way of life called Folsom, named after a town in New Mexico near which the first Folsom points were found. Folsom culture resembled Clovis in a number of ways. Centered in the same general area, both were associated with fluted points and big game animals. For Clovis it was the mammoth; for Folsom, Bison antiquus, the much larger forerunner of the modern Bison bison.
Folsom points were smaller (one to three inches) than Clovis and more detailed. The Folsom flute, however, is much longer and deeper, running two-thirds of the way from the base to the point, and like Clovis, sometimes fluted only on one side.
Bison antiquus was a formidable target. It was—extrapolating from what is known of Bison bison—very intelligent, unpredictable, incredibly strong, and agile. To make matters more challenging, it ran in herds numbering into the thousands. Bison antiquus stood about seven and a half feet at the shoulder and weighed approximately 2,400 pounds. The distance between horn tips was four and a half feet, and one species’ horns measured six feet or more.
Modern Bison can run at sustained speeds of thirty miles-per-hour and maintain forty-five for short distances. They are excellent swimmers, even crossing water barriers a kilometer wide. They can jump six feet vertically and seven horizontally. Whereas a typical cattleguard spans about seven feet, because of the bison’s jumping ability, those on bison ranches are often fourteen feet. Bison were so dangerous and powerful that, though the Plains teamed with wolves and grizzly bears, none focused on it as a major food source.
The capabilities of bison, particularly their speed, suggest another reason for the development of longer flutes on Folsom points as compared to those of Clovis. Poisoned arrows prevent prey from running a great distance before dying, a particularly important condition in rough terrain or thick forests. The kill attempt depicted in The Hunters illustrates that, if the wounded animal distanced itself from the hunter, predators could find it first.
In considering the environment of the Folsom hunters and Bison antiquus, one might say that the above qualifications do not apply. The Plains, for the most part, are flat and the terrain uncluttered. But, because of the bison’s speed and ability to swim and jump impressive distances, coupled with the difficulty of tracking an animal traveling with a herd leaving thousands of hoof prints, the Folsom hunters would have needed poison to prevent the animal from outdistancing them. Thus, the flutes are larger; that is, they may have carried heavier loads of poison. The smaller points created more efficient spear-thrower darts, ones not so heavily weighted forward like larger Clovis type. They were more efficient for throwing atlatl darts greater distances at running bison whereas long-distance shooting was unnecessary for mammoth hunters. The idea that Folsom hunters developed the spear thrower is pure conjecture, though a commonly held surmise.
The fluted traditions on the southern Plains faded with the rise of the Plano traditions (10,000—7,000 years ago). It is assumed that by this time the Plains people hunted in large semitribal groups. The use of poisons continued, as is witnessed from their near-universal presence at the time of contact. Over the thousands of years that must be considered, the ancient Indians perhaps refined their poisons, leading to a diminished need for fluting as lighter applications sufficed to maintain killing power. Most were so potent at the time of contact that a relatively small amount could kill or maim.
Archaeology cannot confirm or deny poison use by Paleo-Indians. The evidence is circumstantial, though thought-provoking. A surface analysis of Clovis and Folsom fluted points might reveal the presence of poison; then again, finding poison residue after thousands of years in the moist environment typical at the time of the great mammoths is unlikely.
Could Stone Age hunters have brought down an animal weighing many tons and standing three or more times the hunter’s height? Yes. Does fluting exist in other parts of the world? Yes. When it occurs, is it associated with poisoning? Yes. Was the generally accepted northeast Asian origin of the Paleo-Indians home to hunting-poison users? Yes.
In 1999, paleo-archaeologist Gary Haynes presented a paper at a scholarly symposium that focused on the most current information available concerning the mixed fate of Clovis hunters and mammoths, particularly the notion that these hunters were responsible for the mammoth’s extinction. He linked his work on modern elephant sites in Zimbabwe with what is known of the Clovis-mammoth relationship. The following is one of his many interesting observations:
And another point that often times is not raised when comparing the modern elephant population depletion during the ivoryhunting craze of 100 years ago is that, in spite of the fact that many elephant populations were driven to about zero—at least to a virtual zero point—during the ivory-hunting phases of the late 19th century in southern Africa, they’ve recovered to some of the highest densities anywhere in Africa within a hundred years. So elephants can recover from over hunting.3
Haynes then asks,
How could Clovis people, with spear points, have hunted an entire population of mammoths in North America to extinction if people with high powered rifles couldn’t do it in the late 19th century?4
Perhaps the use of projectile-point poisoning by Paleo-Indians offers at least part of the answer.
World History
