ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN—According to a Newsweek report, Clovis people are thought to have returned to a seasonal campsite in southwestern Michigan over a period of three to five years, where they made and sharpened their distinctive stone points. Brendan Nash of the University of Michigan said that analysis of traces of protein on the tools unearthed at the Belson site indicates that the Clovis campers consumed a wide variety of large and small animals, including hare, caribou or deer, peccary, and musk ox. Independent researcher Thomas Talbot determined that some of the points had been made from Paoli chert from northeastern Kentucky, some 400 miles away. Other points unearthed at the Belson site had been made of Attica chert from western Indiana and eastern Illinois, some 120 miles away. Nash thinks that some of the Clovis travelers may have wintered in central Indiana and summered at Michigan’s Belson site, while others may have migrated between western Kentucky and central Indiana. “In this way, people formed ‘links in a chain’ with yearly routes that likely connected the whole continent, from Michigan to Mexico,” Nash said. “This is why technology from the Clovis period is so similar throughout most of North America,” he explained. Read the original scholarly article about this research in PLOS ONE. For more on the Belson site, go to “Around the World: Michigan.”
