The American horse, American camel, and giant ground sloth were similarly gone or nearly gone.

What remained was the fauna that persists today in modified form: bison, elk, deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, bears, wolves, coyotes, and smaller mammals.

These were real and substantial food resources, and the early Holocene hunters of the Rocky Mountains had to adapt their strategies from the megafauna-focused hunting of the late Pleistocene to the more diverse, more mobile prey of the early Holocene landscape.

The Hourglass Cave man was part of this adapting world — a member of a community that had developed the subsistence strategies, the technological traditions, and the landscape knowledge needed to live in the Rocky Mountain high country at a time when the world was still settling into the ecological patterns that would define it for the following millennia.