The tip struck bone.

Because it struck bone, it was encased in bone.

Because it was encased in bone, it survived when everything around it — the soft tissue of the mastodon, any organic components of the weapon that were not embedded in the rib — decomposed and disappeared.

This accident of preservation tells us something important about what we don’t know.

If bone tools were common among pre-Clovis and early Clovis-era peoples — and there is good reason to think they were, given the evidence from other parts of the world and from the skill level that the Manis point demonstrates — then the stone-dominated record of early American technology is giving us a severely incomplete picture.

We are seeing the material that survived the differential decay that favors stone.