The radiocarbon dates obtained from the human remains and the associated materials placed the burial at approximately 12,600 to 12,700 years before the present.

These dates made the Anzick burial one of the oldest known human burials in the Americas — a distinction it has maintained even as additional ancient sites have been discovered and dated in the decades since.

The Tools And What They Said

To understand why the Anzick burial was significant even before the DNA analysis, it helps to understand what Clovis technology represented in the history of American archaeology and why the question of who made these tools mattered so much.

Clovis technology was first identified in the 1930s near Clovis, New Mexico, where distinctive stone points were found in direct association with the bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna — mammoths, ancient bison, and other large animals that disappeared from the Americas at the end of the Ice Age.