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Mammoth Hunt Quotations 

"From the evidence found, it appears that the Clovis people came from Asia and probably walked across the land bridge around 15,000 years ago. They reached the San Pedro Valley around 13,000 years ago." Murray Clovis Interpretive Site Sign, San Pedro River Valley, Arizona.
"Many of the Ice Age animals were very large. Most of the species of bison resembled today's bison, but were considerably larger. They roamed in herds across the open landscape. The Columbia mammoth was the largest of the several species of mammoths with tusks that could be up to sixteen feet long. Some of the sloths were bigger than a modern elephant. The dire wolf, tapir, camel, and saber-toothed cat were all larger than their present day relatives." Murray Clovis Interpretive Site Sign, San Pedro River Valley, Arizona.
"To have seen them, to have walked out on the continent and seen animals none of us have ever seen, ambling in herds, walking alone. There on the Texas plain, a small group of mammals, the largest bull standing 11 feet high at the shoulder, his head domed, his back slopping sharply to the hind-quarters, his enormous tusks sweeping forward. She is a grazer, an animal dependent on expanses of grass and herbs." William MacLeish, The Day Before America (1994), p. 39.
"Mammoths needed vast amounts of water to survive. There were indications that these hunts occurred during a period of drought. During a drought, with watering holes drying up and becoming scarce, hunters could stake out the best ones and wait. Most likely, the hunters used spears with atlatls. An atlatl is a throwing stick that helps to propel a spear farther and faster. This provides an advantage in hunting, allowing hunters to keep a safer distance away. Once a mammoth was wounded by several spears, a group of hunters could have then closed in to make the kill." Murray Clovis Interpretive Site Sign, San Pedro River Valley, Arizona.
"Dr. Paul S. Martin of the University of Arizona has put forth a theory that humans contributed to the demise of the megafauna by over-hunting, causing strain on these animals, who were already struggling to survive. These skilled hunters arrived on the scene and may have taken advantage of the situation. Murray Clovis Interpretive Site Sign, San Pedro River Valley, Arizona. See Paul S. Martin, "Prehistoric Overkill," in Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause, eds. Paul S. Martin and Herbert E. Wright, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); also Paul S. Martin, "Pleistocene Overkill," Natural History, December, 1967: 32-38.
"Climate changes were pervasive at the end of the Pleistocene. Temperatures warmed by roughly thirteen degrees Fahrenheit, and the climate became drier overall. Affecting animals and plants more than higher temperatures and increased aridity, however, was probably the rise in seasonal temperature extremes. Winters became colder and summers hotter. . . . For some species there may have been less food. . . . Climate changes may have destroyed a particular patchiness in habitat supposedly enjoyed by species like mammoths (on which human hunters also focused their energies). . . . Because it is naive to think that any single factor was solely responsible for all Pleistocene extinctions, it is safest not to rule out a role for Native Americans altogether. . . . It makes sense to hypothesize that Paleoindians pushed certain species already heading toward their doom over the edge to extinction." Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 38, 40-41.