A tradition of bone tool manufacture — from which a bone projectile point might represent one application — would be entirely consistent with a coastal-adapted people who worked with organic materials as readily as with stone.

More broadly, the Manis bone point suggests that the first Americans brought with them, or developed rapidly after arrival, a diverse toolkit that included both stone and organic materials.

The specific tools that survive in the archaeological record are the ones that were made from durable materials.

The full range of tools that were used — the bone, the wood, the plant fiber, the sinew — is largely invisible because those materials rarely survive.

The Manis rib and its embedded point represent a window through that preservation barrier: a rare glimpse of the organic technology that was present but almost never preserved.