The Clovis people were not limiting their technological sophistication to stone; they were applying the same commitment to craft excellence to their bone tools that they applied to their stone points.

The Folsom Culture and What Came Next

The Clovis culture did not end abruptly.

It transformed.

And the transformation — driven primarily by the ecological changes associated with the end of the Pleistocene and the extinction of the megafauna — produced the technological diversification that characterizes the late Pleistocene and early Holocene archaeological record across North America.

The Folsom culture, which appears in the archaeological record shortly after Clovis and which is concentrated primarily on the Great Plains, represents the adaptation of Clovis-derived technology to the changed ecological conditions of the early Holocene.

With mammoths gone, Folsom hunters focused primarily on bison — the great herds of Pleistocene bison (Bison antiquus, a species larger than the modern bison) that survived the Pleistocene extinctions and that became the dominant large herbivore of the Plains.