But the underlying cognitive and technical principles that made stone tool production possible were preserved and transmitted across all of these changes.

The Clovis knappers who shaped the points in the Anzick burial were working with knowledge that had deep roots in the human past — knowledge of stone mechanics that had been developed and refined by human beings for hundreds of thousands of years before Clovis, going back to the earliest stone tool traditions of Africa.

And the knowledge they were refining and expressing in the specific Clovis point tradition would be transmitted forward, through the chain of technological and cultural succession, to their descendants.

The International Context of the Discovery