Rewriting the Textbook (Again): The Clovis Didn’t Use the Atlatl

Radiocarbon dating and an extinction-based model suggest the atlatl postdates the Clovis by roughly two millennia.

Many years ago, my class and I sat down to discuss the first people, or rather the first cultures, to emerge on various continents and regions. We made our way from South Africa’s San, over to Australia, and eventually made it to the Americas. We were told that the first culture in the Americas were the Clovis.

Thinking back on it, it was actually odd that we learned this, since evidence for pre-Clovis people had already been around for years by then. But I guess our old textbooks had not been updated yet.

Now we know the Clovis were not the first people to populate the Americas, but we do still have many questions about them. One persistent narrative that still endures today is that the Clovis were big-game hunters, using tools like an atlatl to take down mammoths. Perhaps the textbooks need to be rewritten again, as new evidence suggests the Clovis never used the atlatl.

The Clovis and the Atlatls

For a long time, the Clovis were the ‘first people’ of the Americas, their distinctive toolkit made up of fluted stone spear points, blades and bone tools, from which everything else later descended.

Since then, older sites have turned up in both North and South America, and genetic evidence shows that people were living in the Americas millennia before the Clovis even existed.

From what we know now, the Clovis existed only for a relatively short span of time, from about 13,500 to 12,750 years ago (though some argue the first Clovis appeared earlier, around 14,000 years ago).

The Clovis were one of at least three toolmaking traditions around at the time. The other two, which coexisted with them during a brief warm spell, were the Western Stemmed Points and South America’s Fishtail points cultures. But then a cold snap, known as the Younger Dryas (~12,750 years ago), hit, and the Clovis vanished.

Before their disappearance, the Clovis preyed on mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses and bison, but whether these were hunted or scavenged is difficult to tell. A stone tool next to a mammoth can mean either. Still, most agree at least some of these creatures were likely hunted.

Archaeologists have long thought the weapon of choice during such hunts would have been the atlatl, basically a hook-like tool which allows the thrower to leverage and launch a spear. It was more precise, flew farther, and reached higher speeds than a traditional spear or javelin, meaning even weaker hunters could effectively contribute to a hunt.

But there’s a catch: no atlatls have ever been found at Clovis sites. The few purported hooks originate from poor contexts, are undated and may neither be an atlatl nor even come from anything Clovis related.

The Extinction Trick for the Atlatl

To determine when the first atlatls likely appeared in the Americas, one needs either to find the oldest (unlikely) or to do what researchers Metin Eren and his colleagues did: borrow a trick from extinction studies and apply it to atlatls.

The idea is simple: if you know when the oldest surviving examples of something are dated, you can estimate how much earlier it probably first appeared.

The researchers gathered radiocarbon dates from 66 atlatls and darts from North America and northern Mexico. They then ran these dates in a calculation 10,000 times, each time picking the 10 oldest estimates, recording them and running the test again.

The 10 oldest atlatls are directly dated to between 9,300 and 6,100 years ago, mainly from the Yukon, with two examples from Texas and Coahuila. Based on the test the researchers had run, the very first atlatls likely appeared 9,996 years ago, centuries after the Clovis had already disappeared (~12,710 cal. BP).

Clovis and the Missing Atlatls

This meant two things:

1. The atlatl, which had already been used in Pleistocene Europe, was never adopted and taken into the New World by America’s first people (to be fair, it also was not adopted and taken into Pleistocene Asia, Africa, or Australia). This suggests that when the atlatl did appear in the Americas, it was an independent technological innovation.

2. If the Clovis did not have atlatls, they must have used something else.

This means the Clovis likely used spears, javelins and arrows to hunt, but these technologies carried much greater risks and required different strategies.

A spear, for example, demands a closer approach, raising the danger of injury or death from panicked megafauna a risk great enough that it may have limited how often small Clovis groups actively chose to go on the hunt. But experiments show these weapons deliver far greater kinetic impact energy than atlatl darts, which could have helped secure a kill when the risk was judged worthwhile. They are also simpler to make than atlatls.

If the Clovis had them, a bow would also have been a good alternative; it provided greater range and accuracy, but at the cost of more complex production and fewer fatal shots.

So, it seems the Clovis did not use atlatls, and by the time atlatls appeared in the Americas, the Clovis were long gone.

I recall as a child wondering if I could throw a stick further by thrusting it with another (it didn’t work), and I am sure I was inspired (even subconsciously) by the atlatl. But perhaps a similar thought went through the minds of the first atlatl creators.

Do you think the Clovis were mainly hunters, or was hunting secondary, and do you think there are much older atlatls still waiting to be found?

Let me know your thoughts, and if you’d like to support the countless hours I pour into researching, writing, and bringing these hidden corners of history to life, why not Buy Me A Coffee

References

Eren, M.I., Bebber, M.R., Walker, R.S., Johnson, C.R., & Buchanan. B. Late Pleistocene Clovis atlatl hunting fails a chronological modeling test, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (28) e2607964123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2607964123 (2026).

Waters MR, Stafford TW Jr, Carlson DL. The age of Clovis-13,050 to 12,750 cal yr B.P. Sci Adv. 2020 Oct 21;6(43):eaaz0455. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz0455. PMID: 33087355; PMCID: PMC7577710.