1 known location can be tried.
1 known location can be tried.
Our article “On the efficacy of Clovis fluted points for hunting proboscideans” (Eren et al., 2021), sought to assess whether these stone points were, as conventional wisdom had it, highly effective weapon components for inflicting lethal wounds on proboscideans. Although Clovis points had been used to bring down proboscideans, we observed that their penetrating ability had limits that reduced their ballistic effectiveness. That, combined with the other tasks for which they are known to have been used, led us to conclude there was little reason to suppose these were specialized implements designed for the narrow purpose of hunting proboscideans, but instead were multifunctional tools. Kilby et al. (2022) contest that conclusion, asserting that Clovis points were “effectively designed to serve as weapon tips and were regularly used to hunt large animals, including mammoths.” Here, we reply to their comment, first correcting their several misrepresentations of our study, then responding to other criticisms offered. We show that woolly mammoths are indeed relevant to an understanding of Clovis point penetration, and that Kilby et al.’s simple analogy to African elephant hunting may not be. We also explain the importance of experimental protocols and proxies, and why neither their analysis of point breakage patterns nor assertions about the association of proboscideans and Clovis points support their claim these were specialized weapon tips. Finally, we address their concern that if Clovis points were multifunctional tools, it would be too complicated to derive Folsom points from them. We see neither compelling reason nor evidence to reject our original conclusion: although multifunctional Clovis points were used to occasionally hunt mammoth, there is little reason to insist they were designed exclusively for that single task.
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Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
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