But stone points required a specific kind of raw material, a specific technique of production, and a specific tradition of technical knowledge to make correctly.

If bone points — like the Manis specimen — were being used at roughly the same time as Clovis, or even before, then the stone-centric picture is incomplete.

It is not wrong, exactly — Clovis points were made, and they were effective, and they represent a real technological tradition.

But they were not the only weapon technology available to the first Americans.

This matters for how we understand the settlement of the Americas.

The coastal migration hypothesis, which places early Americans along the Pacific Coast before they moved into the interior, assumes that those coastal migrants had some technological capability to exploit marine and coastal resources — to fish, to hunt sea mammals, to navigate complex coastal environments.