It was a cultural catastrophe that required the Clovis-descended cultures to fundamentally reorganize their subsistence strategies, their technological systems, and probably their social structures.

The world the Clovis people had built their culture around disappeared in a geological instant, and the cultures that followed had to adapt to a fundamentally different ecological reality.

That adaptation produced the full diversity of post-Clovis Native American cultures.

And the genetic thread that runs through all of those cultures — back through the Folsom hunters, back through the Clovis expansion, back to the founding Beringian population — runs through the child in the Montana sandstone.

The Weight of What We Do Not Know