Archaeologists of North American paleo-history hardly find a Clovis point, it sometimes seems, unless it is embedded in the mammoth bone some early hunter droven it into. Humankind erupted into the Americas, goes the story, and the big prey species were quickly hunted to extinction or, like the bison, changed into something quite new.
The Economist, of all sources, notes an alternative history. Scientists are finding evidence that hints of a catastrophe in North America at about 12,900 years ago. This one was not a meteor like the one that did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, they theorize. It would have been a comet that vaporized above the earth, leaving no vast crater but producing an enormous heat explosion sufficient to devastate North America. Maybe that's what killed the mammoths, speculates James Kennett of UCal Santa Barbara. Maybe it killed the Clovis people too, and a second migration or a remnant population had to start all over again.
Hmm. What would this startlingly recent disaster have done to the remaining glaciation? To the oceans? Would there really be so little evidence for it? Why were, say, grizzlies, caribou, and bison spared?
Sounds like a catchy theory that needs work.
