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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 the short-faced bear (Arctodus simus), American lions (Panthera leo atrox) , and saber-toothed cats (Smilodon californicus).  Clovis hunters would have clashed repeatedly with these, much-larger carnivores while hunting the same prey: the mammoths and other megafaunal herbivores.

Humans, intelligent, social mammals with weapons, language, tools and fire, had serious advantages over megafaunal hunters, giving them greater, and destabilizing access to the giant herbivores in this 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.” These behemoths, in turn, provided large volumes of protein for both human and nonhuman predators.

The earliest evidence of human beings in the Southern California 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 before the present (BP), contemporaneous with the Clovis culture that is now firmly dated from 13.2 to 12.8 thousand calendar years BP.  Note that the Clovis culture lasted only 400 years in North America.  A nomadic people dependent upon migratory big game, they were just as vulnerable to the extinction of the megafauna as other top predators like Arctodus.

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 at the top of the food chain, even though their rulership of the region lasted only a short time.  Their very success pushed all of the keystone species to extinction and produced an ecological collapse that depleted their own livelihood and led to the human abandonment of the Los Angeles Basin for almost three thousand years.Note 

The arrival of the Chumashans--a seaborne maritime and sedentary hunter-gatherers--at the end of the Interregnum decided the issue of the post-extinction ecology.  The new eco-system would be anthropogenic: human-adapted.  

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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
  3. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles and Its Places in Global History, From the Pleistocene to the Present Phil Ethington

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