The mastodon killed or attacked at Manis was a real animal with a real life history that ended at a specific moment.

The bone point in its rib is the physical record of that ending, or at least of a significant event near that ending.

And the species that individual belonged to was gone from North America within two thousand years of that moment — gone from a continent where they had lived for millions of years, lost in the same wave of extinctions that swept away the mammoths, the giant ground sloths, the American horses and camels, the short-faced bears.

The Manis mastodon is a small piece of that larger story: evidence that humans and mastodons were in genuine conflict — predator and prey — during the period when the mastodons’ world was ending.