The bison that survived the Pleistocene extinctions and became the dominant large herbivore of the Great Plains were, in the early Holocene, still the larger Ice Age species, Bison antiquus, rather than the smaller modern bison, Bison bison.

The Folsom hunters who followed Clovis on the Plains were hunting animals comparable in size to modern American bison but somewhat larger, and the hunting strategies they developed — including the sophisticated bison drive techniques that are documented archaeologically at sites like the Olsen-Chubbuck bison kill site in Colorado — represented a major cultural and technological achievement.

The Folsom and subsequent Plains cultures developed a specific relationship with bison that would eventually produce the nomadic Plains buffalo-hunting cultures that are among the most iconic in American popular consciousness — the mounted, buffalo-hunting cultures of the historic period.

That iconic culture was itself relatively recent, dependent on the reintroduction of horses to the Americas by Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century.