Late Pleistocene horse and camel hunting at the southern margin of the ice-free corridor: reassessing the age of Wally's Beach, Canada

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Clovis; Pleistocene; Pre-Clovis; extinction; megafauna.

Fig. 1.

(A) Map showing the location of Wally’s Beach (j) and other sites: a, Colby, WY; b, Murray Springs, AZ; c, Blackwater Draw, NM; d, Lehner, AZ; e, Domebo, OK; f, Dent, CO; g, Lange-Ferguson, SD; h, Lubbock Lake, TX; i, El Fin del Mundo, Mexico; k, Firelands, OH; l, Manis, WA; m, Lindsay, MT; n, Schaefer, WI; o, Page-Ladson, FL; p, Hebior, WI. (B) Butchered horse carcass with large stone and artifacts (Horse B). (C) Butchered camel carcass with artifacts. (D) Biface fragment associated with Horse 1. (E) Edge-modified flake tool associated with Horse C. (F) Edge-modified flake tool associated with Horse B. (G) Large biface associated with Horse 2. (H) Large unifacial chopper associated with Horse 2. (I) Core tool associated with camel.

Fig. 2.

Calibrated ages for horse and camel kill sites at Wally’s Beach and other megafauna kill and butchering sites in North America. Solid animal shapes indicate artifacts are present at the corresponding site. Sites where Clovis points were found are indicated by the fluted-point symbol. Unfilled animal shapes indicate that no artifacts are present at the corresponding site, but kill and butchering is indicated by taphonomic evidence.