Whatever the relative contributions of climate change and human hunting to the megafauna extinctions, the result was the same: the primary prey animals that Clovis technology was optimized to hunt were gone.

In the absence of the megafauna, the Clovis subsistence strategy needed to change.

And it did.

The archaeological cultures that follow Clovis in the record — broadly termed “late Paleo-Indian” cultures, including traditions like Folsom in the Plains, Plano on the northern Plains, and various regional traditions elsewhere — show changes in technology that reflect changing ecological conditions.

Folsom points, for example, are smaller and more finely worked than Clovis points, and they are consistently associated with bison rather than mammoths — reflecting the shift to a different primary prey animal as the mammoths disappeared.

The transformations in stone tool technology over the millennia following Clovis eventually lead, through many intermediate stages, to the full diversity of Native American technological traditions documented archaeologically and ethnographically.