DID the ancient Clovis people of North America drive mammoths to extinction by slaughtering them? Not according to a study of mammoth tooth enamel.
Kathryn Hoppe of Stanford University in California measured isotopes of carbon and other elements in the enamel of fossil mammoth teeth from three American Clovis sites 10,000 to 13,000 years old in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. At each site, the teeth contained a wide variety of isotope ratios consistent with long-term changes in local vegetation and diet. She found similar wide variations at a site where mammoths were not hunted and their remains built up over thousands of years. But at another site where a group of mammoths all drowned at once, the isotope ratios did not vary much (Paleobiology, vol 30, p 129).
Hoppe says this suggests the mammoths at Clovis sites were unrelated animals killed individually over a long period, so the hunters probably did not hasten the animal鈥檚 extinction. Adrian Lister, an expert on mammoths at University College London, agrees. 鈥淥ne of the problems with the 鈥榦verkill鈥� theory has always been that it is difficult to test. The isotope work is an ingenious approach,鈥� he says. 鈥淢ass killing now seems improbable.鈥�
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