In most temperate soils — the kind that cover most of North America outside the permafrost zones — bone decomposes within decades to centuries after burial.

A bone tool buried at a campsite fourteen thousand years ago will, in the vast majority of environments, have vanished entirely within a few hundred years at most.

This means that the record of bone tool technology in early American sites is massively under-sampled.

For every bone tool that happens to survive in an exceptional preservation environment, there are thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — that were made and used and discarded and simply dissolved into the soil, leaving no trace.

The Manis bone point survived because it was driven into mastodon bone.