Waters and Stafford (Reports, 23 February 2007, p. 1122) provided useful information about the age of some Clovis sites but have not definitively established the temporal span of this cultural complex in the Americas. Only a continuing program of radiometric dating and careful stratigraphic correlations can address the lingering ambiguity about the emergence and spread of Clovis culture.

Various chronologies of the earliest Native American occupations have been proposed with varying levels of empirical support and conceptual rigor, yet none is widely accepted. A recent survey of pre-Clovis dated sites (Becerra-Valdivia and Higham 2020 Becerra-Valdivia, Lorena , and Thomas Higham. 2020. “The Timing and Effect of the Earliest Human Arrivals in North America.” Nature 584: 93–97. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ) concludes a pre-Last Glacial Maximum (>26,500–19,000 cal yr BP) entry of humans in the Americas, in part based on recent work at Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico. We evaluate the evidence used to develop this inference. To provide clarity, we present three explicit dispersal models for the earliest human dispersals to the Americas: Strict Clovis-First (13,050 cal yr BP), Paleoindian (16,000 cal yr BP, encompassing pre-LGM, preferred by Becerra-Valdivia and Higham ( 2020 Becerra-Valdivia, Lorena , and Thomas Higham. 2020. “The Timing and Effect of the Earliest Human Arrivals in North America.” Nature 584: 93–97. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] )), and we summarize the current genetic and archaeological evidence bearing on each. We regard all purported Pre-Paleoindian sites as equivocal and the Strict Clovis-First model to be equally unsupported at present. We conclude that current data strongly support the Paleoindian Dispersal model, with Native American ancestors expanding into the Americas sometime after 16,000 cal yr BP (and perhaps after 14,800 cal yr BP), consistent with well-dated archaeological sites and with genetic data throughout the western hemisphere. Models of the Americas’ peopling that incorporate Chiquihuite or other claimed Pre-Paleoindian sites remain unsubstantiated.

This paper presents a list of >100 publicly known late Quaternary proboscidean sites that have certain or possible traces of hominin utilization in Africa, Europe, and Asia, along with a sample of references, chronometric or estimated ages, and brief descriptions of the associated materials and bone modifications. Summary discussions of important sites are also presented. Lower Palaeolithic/Early Stone Age hominins created far fewer proboscidean site assemblages than hominins in later Palaeolithic phases, in spite of the time span being many times longer. Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age hominins created assemblages at eight times the earlier hominin rate. Upper Palaeolithic/Later Stone Age hominins created site assemblages at >90 times the rate of Lower Palaeolithic hominins. Palaeoloxodon spp. occur in nearly one third of the sites with an identified or probable proboscidean taxon and Mammuthus species are in nearly one half of the sites with identified or probable taxon. Other identified proboscidean genera, such as Elephas, Loxodonta, and Stegodon, occur in few sites. The sites show variability in the intensity of carcass utilization, the quantity of lithics bedded with bones, the extent of bone surface modifications, such as cut marks, the diversity of associated fauna, and mortality profiles.

Proboscideans may have been important prey for Pleistocene foragers in the Americas. Dozens of proboscidean sites have been claimed to show evidence of human involvement dating to MIS 3 or in a few cases even earlier. Summaries are provided here for >70 sites. Also presented are discussions of patterns and variability in the claims. Suggestive traces of human use of carcasses such as associated stone tools or butchering marks vary from few or none in the oldest sites to relatively many in the latest (Clovis-era) sites. Evidence to distinguish scavenging from killing is not clear in most cases, but cut marks on bones in a few sites indicate that fully fleshed carcasses were butchered before carnivores stripped meat. Only one assemblage contains a bone with a possible weapon tip fragment embedded in it, a kind of find that is also rare in Eurasian mammoth sites. The oldest sites in the Americas are notably different from Old World assemblages, including those dating >1 Ma.