CLOVIS, N.M. — He lived among saber-toothed cats, hunted giant mammoths and bison and was smart enough to dig water wells.
Other than that, even thousands of years later, we still don't know much about the people known collectively as Clovis Man.
Last week marked 75 years since a local amateur archaeologist discovered Clovis Man at Blackwater Draw, about 14 miles southwest of Clovis in eastern New Mexico.
Clovis people lived between 11,500 and 13,000 years ago. Since Clovis Man's discovery, evidence has surfaced that prehistoric man's first North American appearance may have been on the East Coast, but many researchers still favor Clovis Man as the oldest.
Clovis, Clovis, Clovis. . .probably the most used and abused people in the world of which we know very little. They were supposedly big game hunters yet we have very few actual sites that unequivocolly show that they actually hunted anything (as opposed to, say, scavenged). They are key to hypotheses concerning the peopling of the Americas and the extinction of several genera of large mammals, yet their basic lifeways still elude us to a large degree. One of these days, I'll post a bunch of links regarding these two very contentious issues.
Tourists To Look for Ancient Persian Army
Feb. 12, 2004 — Tourists traversing Egypt's desert may solve a mystery that has puzzled archaeologists for centuries: what happened to the 50,000-man Persian army of King Cambyses.
Set up by tourist operator Aqua Sun Desert, the Cambyses project will comb the desert sands using four-wheel-drive vehicles packed with paying tourists eager to find the remains of the lost army swallowed in a sandstorm in 524 B.C., according to the account of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus.
"What did you do on vacation this year?"
"Oh, I found Cambyses' army that was swallowed by a sandstorm two and a half thousand years ago. You?"