In an environment where good knapping stone was scarce or difficult to obtain, and where very large animals provided abundant high-quality cortical bone, making tips from bone was not a fallback position — it was a rational adaptation.

The Animal That Was Hunted

Mastodons were not simple prey.

An American mastodon — a fully adult bull — weighed somewhere between four and six metric tons and stood approximately nine feet at the shoulder.

Its tusks, which could exceed ten feet in length, were formidable defensive weapons.

Its thick hide and the mass of its body provided substantial protection against anything less than a precisely delivered blow.

Mastodons were browsers — primarily forest-edge animals that fed on woody vegetation — and they would have been familiar with predators, though probably not with human hunters.