S8 Ep149: 2/8. Clovis Culture and the American Extinction: Early Humans as Ecological Simplifiers — Dan Flores — The Clovis culture, emerging approximately 13,000 years ago, rapidly spread across North America in a remarkably brief timeframe. Flores connects the Cl

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

2/8. Clovis Culture and the American Extinction: Early Humans as Ecological Simplifiers — Dan Flores — The Clovis culture, emerging approximately 13,000 years ago, rapidly spread across North America in a remarkably brief timeframe. Flores connects the Clovis expansion to the "American extinction," wherein large megafauna including mammoths disappeared with striking rapidity. Flores explains that emerging scientific consensus attributes this ecological simplification to humans functioning as novel apex predators, potentially engaging in surplus killing behavior and inducing genomic isolation within animal populations, effectively severing breeding populations and accelerating extinction processes.

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0:00.0	This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchewitt. Dan Florence, his new book is Wild New World,
0:07.6	the epic story of animals and people in America. The Clovis culture, so-called, because of where it was identified,
0:16.0	that tools were suggestive of a developing culture,'s important first to establish where the sites are,
0:22.6	and Dan's book wonderfully gives us a map of what's been found so far.
0:27.6	They're more defined.
0:29.6	And these are between around 13,000 years ago.
0:32.6	There's speculation that human beings, as we, the modern human beings, were here before them,
0:39.8	but it's important to establish why Clovis matters.
0:43.5	Dan, it's the tools, it's the hunting skills, it's the remains of the sites.
0:48.5	Is that why we key on that 13,000 years ago?
0:54.2	It really is all those, all those things you mentioned.
0:58.5	As you referred to, we do believe, we're pretty convinced, in fact,
1:05.6	by a set of footprints found in southern New Mexico just four or five years ago,
1:10.1	that people did get here,
1:13.4	even before the glacial maximum, 23,000 years ago.
1:18.8	But it looks as if their populations were really small.
1:24.0	And one of the reasons we think that is because when the Clovis migration happens,
1:28.8	and it happens when the ice sheets in North America open sufficiently to allow an
1:35.2	overland migration out of Siberia into what is now Canada and the lower 48 states of the U.S.,
1:43.3	when that happens, this migration takes place with
1:47.0	such rapidity that it implies that there's not really anyone in the way of us. There's not really
1:54.1	anyone that's slowing down this Clovis movement from all the way from Alaska to the tip
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