DID CLOVIS HUNTERS BUTCHER PLEISTOCENE MAMMALS AT GYPSUM CAVE, NEVADA?

Gypsum Cave, located a few miles northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada, was excavated in 1930 by archaeologist Mark Harrington and paleontologist James Thurston. Thurston had been hired for this project by Chester Stock of the California Institute of Technology. The archaeological material from this excavation was described by Harrington in a 1933 monograph, but the paleonotological material has never been studied and described. Thurston died in early 1932, and Chester Stock was distracted by many other projects. In 1957 the Gypsum Cave bones, along with CalTech’s entire vertebrate paleontology collection, were sold to the Los Angeles County Museum, where they lay undescribed for another forty-six years.

In his 1933 monograph, Harrington described several places within Gypsum Cave where Pleistocene dung and/or bones lay stratigraphically above human artifacts. However, a small number of radiocarbon dates obtained decades later did not support Harrington’s stratigraphy and cast a dark cloud over Harrington’s interpretation that humans met Pleistocene animals face-to-face in Gypsum Cave.

We are currently studying the Gypsum Cave fauna reposited at the Los Angeles County Museum. More than twenty species of vertebrates comprise the Gypsum Cave fauna, but the collection is volumetrically dominated by four species of large mammals. These are the Shasta ground sloth (Nothrotheriops shastensis), horse (Equus sp.), camel (Camelops sp.), and mountain sheep (Ovis canadensis). Many of the bones of these large mammals are completely or partially charred, and several display marks, grooves, and fractures that may be the result of butchering by humans. Through a taphonomic analysis of the Gypsum Cave bones, we are testing this hypothesis. Our preliminary results support the interpretation that Clovis hunters butchered Pleistocene mammals at Gypsum Cave.