Ice Age mammals were probably something to reckon with, says National Park Service archeologist David Anderson. “They would’ve been pretty impressive,” he says, among them saber tooth tigers, short faced bears, wolves, and bison.

An extinct form of the species, Bison antiquitus, roamed the southeastern lowlands, and with mammoth and mastodon was likely a primary source of food and raw materials for the region’s first inhabitants.

The skull of such an animal, with a projectile point broken off in its forehead, was found in Florida’s Wacissa River, just about the clearest association possible between humans and the now-extinct animals of the era. next >>

At Little Salt Springs, also in Florida, a giant land tortoise was discovered that may have been speared with a wooden stake. Butchering or other tooling marks on mammoth bones, as well as finished points, foreshafts, and other objects carved from green bone or ivory, have been found at several places in the state.

Remains of essentially modern animals have been recovered at a number of later early American sites, typically in rock shelter settings like Dust Cave and the Stanfield-Worley bluff shelter in Alabama. << back