This is consistent with a thrown or thrust weapon delivered from roughly the same elevation as the animal’s flank — suggesting that the hunter was on the ground, not elevated above the animal, and was directing the weapon at the animal’s side.

Ethnographic accounts of mastodon and elephant hunting from Africa — where hunters have used spears and arrows against elephants into the modern era — describe approaches that include driving animals into water or mud where they become mired and less able to charge, ambushes at water sources, and group hunts in which multiple hunters drive the animal and then approach to deliver killing blows to the vulnerable areas of the face, neck, and flanks.

None of these methods can be confirmed for the Manis event, but they represent the range of approaches available to hunters equipped with projectile weapons trying to kill very large animals.

What the rib evidence does confirm is that someone got close enough, and aimed well enough, to drive a bone point through the outer cortex of a mastodon’s rib.