Mammoth featured heavily in Western Clovis diet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ancient Native American ancestors (Clovis) have been interpreted as either specialized megafauna hunters or generalist foragers. Supporting data are typically indirect (toolkits, associated fauna) or speculative (models, actualistic experiments). Here, we present stable isotope analyses of the only known Clovis individual, the 18-month-old Anzick child, to directly infer maternal protein diet. Using comparative fauna from this region and period, we find that mammoth was the largest contributor to Clovis diet, followed by elk and bison/camel, while the contribution of small mammals was negligible, broadly consistent with the Clovis zooarchaeological record. When compared with second-order consumers, the Anzick-1 maternal diet is closest to that of scimitar cat, a mammoth specialist. Our findings are consistent with the Clovis megafaunal specialist model, using sophisticated technology and high residential mobility to subsist on the highest ranked prey, an adaptation allowing them to rapidly expand across the Americas south of the Pleistocene ice sheets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".