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Regime II -- Clovis Conquest: First Peoples and Mass Extinction, From 13,000 to 10,000 Years Ago

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The Clovis people were the first to wrest control of the Los Angeles Basin from its non-human rulers: the fearsome American lions (Panthera leo atrox) and saber-toothed cats, (Smilodon californicus). While the Clovis people would have had few material reasons to hunt Smilodon (other than for honor or status), they competed with them and with packs of dire wolves for the massive megafaunal herbivores. In the most primitive sense, the first regional regime of the Los Angeles Basin was a violent struggle for control of a remarkably resource-rich environment. The very giantism of the mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, and Bison antiquus is evidence, in the form of biomass, of “capital accumulation.”  Columbian Mammoths (Mammuthus columbi), weighing up to 10 metric tons and eating as much as 320 kg (700 lbs) of vegetation per day, were only one of several very large mammals supported by this ecosystem. These behemoths, in turn, provided large volumes of protein for both human and nonhuman predators.































The earliest evidence of human beings in this region is that of a seaborne arrival, at the Arlington Springs site on Santa Rosa Island. The date is reliable within one hundred years: between 13.1 to 13 thousand calendar years BP, contemporaneous with the Clovis culture that is now firmly dated from 13.2 to 12.8 thousand calendar years BP. Producing fine fluted stone blades for spears, knives, scrapers, and other tools, the Clovis people were nomadic hunters of megafauna (animals larger than 45 kg), ranging in size from deer and camels to the very large mastodonts, mammoths, archaic bison, and giant ground sloths, that once roamed all of North America.  The Clovis people were most probably not the first people of Homo sapiens lineage set foot in the Los Angeles Basin. Indeed, human occupation of other sites in the Americas are well-established at 30,000 years and even older.  The importance of the Clovis invaders lies in the durable role they played in transforming the ecology to one ruled by humans.  Clovis were the first human rulers of Los Angeles to establish themselves permanently at the top of the food chain.  This first human conquest was an ecological one: pushing hundreds of species to extinction.[1]































































But the Clovis people were all too successful. During their relatively short occupation of North America, fully 33 species of megafauna became extinct precisely at the end of their era in the archeological record. Debate continues over the relative role of climatic versus human agency in this catastrophic extinction event, but the weight of evidence for North America is that Mammoth-hunting humans pushed, at the very least, a stressed population of megafauna over the edge of eternal doom. The extinction of saber-toothed cats, the American lions, and dire wolves necessarily followed that of their primary food sources. The entire Pleistocene world collapsed in a terrestrial instant.[2]































































About a few thousand years elapsed between the catastrophic disappearance of both Clovis and the megafauna, around 12.9 thousand calendar years ago, and the next durable human occupation about 10.2 thousand calendar years ago. Most probably a period of terrible scarcities, it is likely that the region was not fit for large animals for a considerable period of time. Mass extinctions are catastrophic events, implying widespread ecosystem imbalance. This transitional period is therefore not given a regional regime number: in all likelihood it was not ruled at all.































































Notes































[1] Waters and Stafford (2007); Goebel et al (2008); Gilbert et al (2008).































































[2] Barnosky et al (2004); Haynes (2002); Grayson and Alloy (2001); Brook and Bowman (2002); Jones and Porcsi (2008).

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  1. Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
  2. Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Phil Ethington
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