Early humans in North America may have put an ancient ancestor of the modern elephant on their menu as a "jumbo-sized" diet choice, archaeologists say.
In the Mexican state of Sonora, they unearthed weapons dated to 13,400 years ago mixed in with the bones of an extinct relative of today's elephants known as gomphotheres, they said.
The find is evidence that the creatures, smaller than mammoths or mastodons but still hefty for all that, were hunted by the prehistoric peoples of the Clovis culture, thought to be the first peoples living in North America, the researchers report.
"The Clovis stereotypically went out and hunted mammoth, and now there's another elephant on the menu," says study co-author Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona.
Gomphotheres, sporting not just two but four sharp tusks for defense, first appeared on Earth as long ago as 33 million years, and until the Mexico find scientific opinion had held that the giant creatures were gone from North America before the Clovis people arrived.
That's been overturned by the findings at the dig site dubbed El Fin del Mundo or the "end of the world" for its remote location, which proved Clovis people were hunting gomphotheres as prey -- and did so successfully.
Mingled with the complete remains belonging to two gomphotheres were Clovis spear points, and the bones showed unmistakable signs of butchering.
"The implications are pretty simple, although certainly not trivial --early human explorers of interior North America opportunistically targeted the largest Pleistocene animals as part of their cultural pattern, and this pattern probably started almost as soon as people had made their way south into the lower 48 states," says Gary Haynes, a University of Nevada, Reno, archaeologist who was not a part of the study team.
The gomphotheres eventually went extinct, replaced by modern two-tusked animals, and something similar happened to the Clovis people as well, with the culture eventually dispersing and evolving into different subcultures in different parts of the North American continent.
And the two events may have been linked, the researchers said, with the disappearance of the gomphotheres and other "megafaune" as food sources possibly causing the dispersal and eventual disappearance of a distinct Clovis culture.
Still, the findings are proof of a link between a peoples and their prey, Holliday says.
"This is the first Clovis gomphothere, it's the first archaeological gomphothere found in North America, it's the first evidence that people were hunting gomphotheres in North America, and it adds another item to the Clovis menu," he says.
