Late Pleistocene horse and camel hunting at the southern margin of the ice-free corridor: Reassessing the age of Wally’s Beach, Canada

Michael R. Waters; Thomas W. Stafford; Brian Kooyman; L. V. Hills

doi:10.1073/pnas.1420650112

Edited by David G. Anderson, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, and accepted by the Editorial Board February 23, 2015 (received for review October 28, 2014)

Significance

Archaeological discoveries at Wally’s Beach, Canada, provide the only direct evidence of horse and camel hunting in the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age. Here, seven horses and one camel were attacked and butchered near a river crossing by prehistoric hunters. New radiocarbon dates revise the age of these kill and butchering localities to 13,300 y ago. Other North American kill and butchering sites show that prehistoric hunters preyed on 6 of the 36 genera of large mammals, called megafauna, for at least 2,000 y before these animals became extinct, around 12,700 y ago. Accurate dating is necessary to build meaningful chronologies for the Ice Age peopling of the Americas and to understand megafauna extinctions.

Abstract

The only certain evidence for prehistoric human hunting of horse and camel in North America occurs at the Wally’s Beach site, Canada. Here, the butchered remains of seven horses and one camel are associated with 29 nondiagnostic lithic artifacts. Twenty-seven new radiocarbon ages on the bones of these animals revise the age of these kill and butchering localities to 13,300 calibrated y B.P. The tight chronological clustering of the eight kill localities at Wally’s Beach indicates these animals were killed over a short period. Human hunting of horse and camel in Canada, coupled with mammoth, mastodon, sloth, and gomphothere hunting documented at other sites from 14,800–12,700 calibrated y B.P., show that 6 of the 36 genera of megafauna that went extinct by approximately 12,700 calibrated y B.P. were hunted by humans. This study shows the importance of accurate geochronology, without which significant discoveries will go unrecognized and the empirical data used to build models explaining the peopling of the Americas and Pleistocene extinctions will be in error.

Footnotes

↵¹To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: mwaters{at}tamu.edu.

Author contributions: M.R.W. and T.W.S. designed research; M.R.W., T.W.S., B.K., and L.V.H. performed research; M.R.W., T.W.S., and B.K. analyzed data; and M.R.W., T.W.S., and B.K. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. D.G.A. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1420650112/-/DCSupplemental.