Clovis culture, dated roughly 13,050 to 12,750 calibrated years BP, is defined by distinctive fluted spearpoints found from coast to coast, often beside mammoth and mastodon kills. It was long framed as the first human presence in the Americas, the Clovis First model, until sites like Monte Verde (c. 14,500 BP) and White Sands footprints (c. 23,000 BP) demolished that claim. The culture's end is sharp: no Clovis artifacts occur in or above the Younger Dryas black mat.
The folk reading, Vance Haynes's own framing: the Clovis-age landscape, the last megafauna, and the culture itself are all sealed under the same black layer, the extinction and the Clovis-Folsom transition occurring in under a century, perhaps much less. Haynes wrote that the abruptness seemed too sudden for human predation or climate alone, and that something major happened at 10,900 radiocarbon years BP that requires explanation.
The claim, from the Carlson and Hancock literature: Clovis was not a primitive beginning but the remnant of something older, and the impact winter wiped the board, leaving flood myths as the only minutes of the meeting. The counter is documented: Clovis technology is a few centuries old at most, and pre-Clovis Americas were populated but sparse.
If the so-called first Americans were neither first nor slow to vanish, what exactly disappeared 12,900 years ago?