Although the contemporary Paleo Diet is trendy, there’s long been anthropological debate about what early man actually ate. Mostly fruit and berries, gathered from foraging? Small game? Or massive mammals?
“That’s been quite a controversy in the last decade or so,” says James Chatters of McMaster University. Chatters and colleagues have attempted to end this debate with a report in Science Advances that says North American people 13,000 years ago dined primarily on large mammals — with mammoth meat as their primary food source.
The report has implications beyond just food choice. What the Clovis people (named for their use of a particular kind of spear head) dined on says much about how they organized their lives.
If the always mobile mammoths were the Clovis peoples’ primary food source, they would need to follow the beasts as they lumbered from one part of North America to another. Archeological evidence has ...
