The Manis Mastodon: Pre-Clovis at Sequim

Just south of Sequim, on what was once a dry peat bog, a farmer named Emanuel Manis was digging a pond in August of nineteen seventy-seven when his backhoe struck something enormous: mastodon tusks. Within hours, word reached Carl Gustafson, a zoologist at Washington State University, who drove out and began what would become one of the most significant archaeological excavations in North American history.

The Manis site yielded the bones of an ancient mastodon, but the truly stunning find came almost immediately. Embedded in one of the creature's ribs was a fragment of sharpened bone, clearly a spear point. The rib showed signs of healing around the wound, which meant the mastodon had survived the strike and walked around with the point lodged inside it for some time before dying. A human being had tried to kill this animal and nearly succeeded.

The question was: when? Gustafson's initial radiocarbon dates placed the site at roughly fourteen thousand years old, but the scientific community was skeptical. At that time, the prevailing model held that humans did not arrive in the Americas until the Clovis culture appeared around thirteen thousand years ago. The idea that hunters were pursuing mastodons near Sequim before Clovis people were thought to exist was controversial enough to keep the discovery in dispute for decades.

The case was reopened in two thousand eleven, when researchers at Texas A and M University's Center for the Study of the First Americans applied CT scanning and DNA analysis to the original find. The CT scan confirmed unambiguously that the embedded fragment had been worked to a needle-sharp point by human hands. Refined radiocarbon dating placed the Manis mastodon's death at between thirteen thousand eight hundred and sixty and thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty-three years ago. That makes it roughly eight hundred years older than the Clovis horizon.

The Manis site is now one of a growing body of pre-Clovis sites reshaping the story of when people first entered the Americas. The old model is gone. Humans were hunting mastodons in the Pacific Northwest while glaciers still held much of the continent.