Abstract
The weaponry technology associated with Clovis and related Early Paleoindians represents the earliest well-defined evidence of humans in Pleistocene North America. We assess the technological diversity of these fluted stone points found at archaeological sites in the western and eastern halves of North America by employing statistical tools used in the quantification of ecological biodiversity. Our results demonstrate that the earliest hunters in the environmentally heterogeneous East used a more diverse set of points than those in the environmentally homogenous West. This and other evidence shows that environmental heterogeneity in the East promoted the relaxation of selective constraints on social learning and increased experimentation with point designs.
Highlights
Measures of diversity are fundamental to the investigation of large-scale patterns in the natural and cultural worlds
Our sample of complete Early Paleoindian (EP) points comes from unmixed assemblages that have been reliably dated to this period, meaning that an assemblage was either associated with radiometric dates in the ca. 13,500–12,800 calBP range in the West and ca. 12,800–12,500 calBP range in the East[3,6,7,21,22,23] or contained diagnostic artifacts that are radiometrically dated to these ranges at another site
We offer three explanations for the significant, consistent, and robust differences in diversity of Clovis and related Early Paleoindian point forms between regions
Summary
Measures of diversity are fundamental to the investigation of large-scale patterns in the natural and cultural worlds. The 95% confidence intervals for the two areas do not overlap, either for Shannon diversity (common point classes) or for Simpson diversity (dominant point classes), implying that the East is significantly more diverse than the West for these measures (middle and lower rows of Fig. 3; Table 1b and c).
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