The 13,900-Year-Old Mastodon Rib Found With A Bone Point Still Inside — And The CT Scan That Put Hunters Before Clovis

The bone was preserved for nearly fourteen millennia by the specific geology of a pond in Washington State.

A backhoe found the mastodon in 1977.

A radiocarbon laboratory, a CT scanner, a protein mass spectrometer, and a 3D reconstruction program extracted the evidence from the bone.

And the hunter — whose name, language, community, and individual story are gone — became, through the accident of a weapon striking a rib rather than passing between the ribs, one of the most specifically documented people in the pre-Clovis history of the Americas.

Not by name.