The first humans to spread across North America during the last ice age put mammoths at the top of their menu, which has yielded the first direct evidence of the diet of those prehistoric humans, Reuters reports.
Researchers have deciphered the diet of a woman who lived about 12,800 years ago based on chemical clues from the bones of her son, whose remains were found in the southern US state of Montana. Because the 18-month-old was still breastfed at the time of his death, his bones carried the chemical imprints of his mother’s diet, transmitted through breast milk.
The researchers found that her diet consisted mainly of meat from megafauna – the largest animals in an ecosystem – with an emphasis on mammoth meat. Megafauna constituted about 96% of its diet, with mammoths representing about 40%, followed by elk, bison, camel and horse, and small mammals and plants had a negligible contribution.
“Megafauna, especially the giant Columbian mammoths, provided humans with enormous amounts of energy-rich meat and fat. A single mammoth could sustain a dependent community of children, women, and the less mobile elderly for days or even weeks. , while hunters searched for their next prey,” said archaeologist James Chatters of the archaeological consulting firm Applied Paleoscience in Bothell, Wash., lead author of the published study. Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
Colombian mammoths, the “cousins” of today’s elephants, had a height of four meters at shoulder level and a weight of up to 11 tons.
The mother and child whose bones were analyzed were part of the Clovis culture, which existed approximately 13,000 years ago. Those highly mobile and nomadic people were associated with artifacts such as large stone spearheads suitable for killing massive animals, large stone knives, and scraping tools for removing flesh.
The findings reinforce the idea that the Clovis people, whose first representatives crossed a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, focused on hunting the largest prey in their habitat, rather than foraging for plants and hunting small animals.
This strategy seems to have allowed those people to spread rapidly throughout North America and then into South America – in just a few centuries – as they followed the long-distance migrations of the animals they hunted.
