Step back from all of the scientific detail — the AMS dates, the CT scans, the protein analysis, the 3D reconstruction — and consider what the Manis mastodon rib actually is, as a physical object.

It is a piece of bone from a very large animal that died approximately 13,900 years ago.

It is mineralized, dark with age, heavy in the way that old bone becomes when the original mineral components are replaced by minerals from the surrounding sediment.

It is large — a mastodon rib is a substantial object, even by the standards of large modern mammals.

And it contains, embedded in its substance, the shattered fragments of a weapon that a human being made and used at a moment that was, from the perspective of the people involved, entirely ordinary — a hunt, an encounter with a large animal, an attempt to kill it.