The embedded object was fragmentary.

It had not been recovered as a complete, visually obvious projectile point.

From one perspective, the fragments inside the rib could be natural bone inclusions — pieces of the mastodon’s own skeleton that had migrated into the rib through natural post-mortem processes.

From another perspective, they could be the result of bone-to-bone contact in a sediment deposit that had compressed and mixed different elements of the skeleton over thousands of years.

Neither of these alternative explanations fully accounted for the geometry of the penetration or the composition of the embedded material.