Hartley mammoth butcher site

The Hartley mammoth butcher site (also called the Hartley mammoth locality) is an archaeological and paleontological site on the Colorado Plateau in New Mexico. Starting in 2013, bones of two mammoths were excavated by Timothy Rowe, a paleontologist from the University of Texas. The bones were of a young female adult and a calf. Rowe and his fellow researchers used various techniques to study the bones and the site. They found "diagnostic evidence of diverse human activities including systematic, highly patterned bone breakage and secondary bone flake production, pyrogenic residues indicative of a controlled (domestic) fire, and utilization of regional vertebrate microfauna." ^[1] The same scientists used radiocarbon dating to determine how long ago the animals had lived. They reported that they were from about 37,000 years ago (38,900–36,250 cal BP).

This site is important because, if the identification as a site with human activity and the dating are correct, it overturns the idea held by many archaeologists that the first people in the Americas belonged to the Clovis culture, which is dated to about 13,000 years ago.