And when you write a book with about 66 million years of history , you obviously have a lot of opportunity to tell stories because there are a lot of stories in a span of time like that . What when you say that the Clovis points and the folsom points with the , the fluted uh part of it , so I could attach a stick to it . There's no people in Europe that figured this out .
Yeah . So they , one of the great things about the whole Clovis period to a little lesser extent , Folsom is that there are these spectacular blades that they did and sometimes they would do blades that were like eight or nine or 10 inches long . And there are some of them caches of some of these blades of that size that indicate they were never used .
These giant bison that became extinct about 10,000 years ago . The ones that the Folsom people had particularly specialized in hunting and as they're excavating the site in the first summer , they come across just sort of lying in the debris , a couple of points like they've never seen before , which are three or four inches long and have these thin flutes on either side at the base . There's one , there's , yeah , there's one right there .
And within a decade , we discover the Clovis site which is out on the Texas New Mexico border . And the Clovis site is of these elephant hunters who are actually even older than the Folsom people . And this pushes when they're finally radiocarbon dated , that site pushes uh the dates back to the 13,000 year range .
There's a , there's a actually a Clovis burial site in Montana of uh of two infants , a young child and an infant . And they were buried with ceremonial Clovis points several inches long covered in sacred , what we think was sacred red ochre . Um And that particular site in 2014 , uh The local native people in Montana is near Bozeman , uh and the local native people and uh and archaeologists um went out to the Shiels River , the nearby Shiels river .
