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FotD Digest AE: the Clovis culture (#1851) of Palaeoindian America was a big deal - identified by these points (speartips) (#1852) that were found all over the continent in a short period of time. Clovis points have a fragile fluted base (#1856) which is very difficult to pull off (#1857), yet almost ubiquitous, even in methodology (#1862). and it's not certain why they did this: maybe Just Cos (#1860) or for shock absorption, as a crumple zone (#1861). after all, they were probably multi-tools (#1858). i just think it's so cool how you can track cultures through tiny details in their inventions found millennia later (#1859) (#1853).

that's it for thus, uh, series-thing! sorry it actually ended like a week ago i'm just a bit haphazard atm. ig this whole digest thingybob is great because nobody notices when i get behind :) and also i can do the facts en-bulk and schedule them so feels a lot easier to hyperfixate hahaha

also - you can find the sources i used for my facts (woah!) over [here]. this was quite an academic one so pretty easy to compile my sources, almost all of them books or articles. no idea if i'll keep this up lol i wouldn't get your hopes up

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#1829: the last glacial maximum, when much of the world was frozen and thus lots of the water was frozen in ice sheets, was about 22 thousand years ago. the ice extended from the top of Greenland to what is now the continental US - the Great Lakes were thought to be formed by the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier about 10-12kyBP. the sheet covering North America in up to 3.2km of ice is called the Laurentide ice sheet, which was so massive (its area is measured in MILLIONS of square miles) that it pretty much dictated the global climate.

since the last glacial maximum, the global sea level has risen drastically. i've seen quite different numbers for exactly how much, but roughly 110-130m in that 22 thousand years. even in the last 5ky there's been a reasonably large rise of about 5m. this has wildly changed the coastline - i was aware of Doggerland, the big bit of land between what's now England, France and Germany that disappeared about 10-8kyBP, but now i'm reading about it in the context of the Floridan peninsula, which has more than halved in area since the last glacial maximum.

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#1862: even though Clovis points vary wildly in shape and size across North America, they were (most probably) made using the same techniques all over.

they used percussion flaking (hitting your rock with another, harder rock) to remove flakes from one rock to shape it. once you've got a biface (flat thing), you thin it by taking off flakes that are at least half the length of the rock, called overface flakes. seems obvious but it is quite an accident-prone method.

see some of the flakes that came off here. by cutting off these larger flakes, they also became useful as something to make smaller tools out of, usually with a sharp edge already.

overface flakes leave behind quite distinctive scars on the rock that make it easy to tell how the point was made, and most notably how the delicate flute at the bottom was done.

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#1861: one of the current prevailing hypotheses for the flutes at the bottom of Clovis points is the "shock absorber" hypothesis: basically, the base became more fragile because it was thinned to a narrow edge, the edge against which it was hafted (lashed to a shaft, for example in a groove). when you make a hit with the point, the bottom absorbs the stress and crumbles a little - rather than the whole thing shattering.

people did a lot of tests on period-accurate replicas (you can get your own solidworks data here haha), and it's (most probably) true that these do indeed absorb shock, and probably indeed increased the lifespan of the Clovis points. which would've been some of the most valuable and useful possessions at the time.

but it's difficult to prove that this was why people chose to go out of their way to make these fluted bases... we have no archeological record of lashings, bindings, haftings, or anything, so we don't know how these were truly used.

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#1860: but what is the point of all this fluted base nonsense! some people say they were decorative, or fashionable, or ritual, or something. after all, rituals are powerful things in history, and Clovis points were often found with traces of red ochre dye on them. and there's the factor of inertia: people fluted the base, because that's what their foreparents did, and so on.

yet Clovis points were certainly multi-tools, and the fluted base was such a costly addition, that it must have had some use? the first hypothesis, when Clovis points were first categorised about a hundred years ago, was that it sped up bleeding in a wounded animal - compare to the grooved bayonets of WW1, which was a recent memory at the time.

but that also can't be right because a Clovis point would've been hafted with sinew to a shaft (attached with strings to a stick). the shaft often had a groove that the base would sit in, nullifying the damage done by the base. the bottom third of the shaft was also usually blunted round the edge, so the base was clearly not really meant to do damage.

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#1859: Clovis points were a great American invention, possibly the first. David Meltzer compares the Clovis point to the hula-hoop: not all that revolutionary an invention, but spread like wildfire, and then died out.

they're nowhere to be found in Northeast Asia (west of Beringia, the land bridge to the Americas) and everywhere to be found east of Beringia. using similar logic, you can kinda pin down where they must've been invented. about 60 points have indeed been found in Alaska, but they're usually much more similar in style to later points, indicating that Clovis points were invented in the Lower 48, and migrated back northwards through the ice.

logically, the oldest Clovis points would be found where they were invented (that would point (pun not intended) to either the Great Plains or the Southwestern US) but that's not really a good proof - the oldest points would also be the hardest to find.

someone called Ronald Mason (no-one you know) argued that "diversity reflects age", so the most diverse points found on the East Coast indicate that they were also the first. apparently this is the same logic that helped Joseph Greenberg piece together the well-agreed-upon language families of the world.

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FotD Digest AD: human beings in Florida gathered where freshwater was, which i spoke about way back in #1835, and so did animals (#1848) in the "Oasis Hypothesis". we can track this using fungal spores (#1837) and in fact megaherbivores returned to the Floridan oases (#1849). this importance of water was one of the reasons (#1855) of a population boom around 11kyBP (#1854) related to a culture called the Bolen. there were in fact lots of different cultures (#1850) including the Clovis (#1851) - more on them later - who are identified by the tools they made (#1852) and can even by tracked by these tools (#1853).

sorry, i'm on a slightly haphazard schedule at the moment... also struggling to compress a week of (8 here) facts into one fact's length... it all feels a bit chaotic. i wrote the facts in a sorta linear order, even though i didn't reference them just now in order, so you're honestly probably just better off reading them on the tumblr timeline haha

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#1858: Clovis points are thought to have been used for lots of different purposes, but primarily as a projectile. they'd be strapped to a pole or something and thrown forwards like a javelin, or maybe a throwing dagger or something. and lots of thrusting and the likes, usual spear stuff. microfracture analysis, yeah yeah, i know what i'm talking about.

but these points, as the token tool of the Clovis culture, were also used for butchery. specimens have wear-and-tear marks that point towards scraping and chopping.

and the way that they found this out is really fun, because they got to make their own period-accurate Clovis points and then use them in various scenarios and look under a microscope to see what happened. for example, they took a replica point and scraped some meat off some bone. a thousand times. literally two thousand strokes, to see what would happen. interestingly, although maybe not surprisingly, it had a polishing effect, which they also found on some period specimens. they noted, "Considerable tension was required to remove the tendons and connective tissue" (Smallwood, 2013). so now you know.