Hunting a mastodon was a dangerous undertaking by any reasonable assessment.

The people who did it — whether they did so repeatedly as an established practice or opportunistically as a rare event — accepted serious risk.

Getting close enough to a mastodon to drive a projectile point through its rib required an approach within a few tens of meters at most, which meant close enough for the animal to detect the hunter and respond.

The evidence from Manis does not tell us about the hunting method beyond what the angle of penetration suggests: the weapon was delivered approximately horizontally into the animal’s flank, aimed at the rib cage.