COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS—According to a statement released by Texas A&M University, a bone projectile point has been identified in a mastodon rib dated to 13,900 years ago by Michael Waters of Texas A&M University and his colleagues. The mastodon rib was unearthed at the Manis Mastodon Site on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in the 1970s. Waters and his team members isolated all of the bone fragments, examined them with computed tomography scans and 3-D software, and printed them out at six times scale. “Then we fit the pieces back together to show what the specimen looked like before it entered and splintered in the rib,” Waters said. When the hunter threw a spear equipped with the bone point, which had been made from the leg bone of another mastodon, it lodged in the rib and failed to reach the animal’s lung. “This shows that the First Americans made and used bone weapons and likely other types of bone tools,” Waters concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Science Advances. For more, go to "America, in the Beginning: Manis Mastodon Kill Site."
