Clovis people were thought to have a special yen for mammoth: great ambulatory meat lockers. Sometimes they herded the hairy creatures en masse into gullies or entangling bogs, driving the animals to their doom with shouts, dogs, torches, and, possibly, shamanic incantations. More often, though, hunters stalked individual beasts until they were close enough to throw a spear in the gut. “Then you just follow them around for a day or two until they keel over from blood loss or infection,” Charles Kay, an ecological archaeologist at Utah State University, told me. “It’s not what we think of as
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