Mammoth Hunter

13,800 years ago giant mastodons ruled the Pacific Northwest, while other creatures cowered in fear. At this time someone figured out that humans, working together as a group, could bring down a mastodon. A mastodon's tusk could be sharpened and fashioned into a spear. At first he or she was ridiculed and told it was impossible. Eventually the human tribe faced the mastodon in a fierce battle. One brave human flung a spear into the beast's ribs and brought it down. Many centuries later the mastodon would be extinct and humans would rule the Earth.In 1977 paleontologist Carl Gustafson came upon a giant tusk that had been found by a bowling-alley owner in Washington's Olympic Peninsula. After a few hours' digging Gustafson uncovered the mastodon's skeleton, buried for thousands of years. He also found a fragment of tusk jammed between the ribs, as if it had been fashioned into a spear and thrust there. After running some tests, Gustafson concluded that humans had brought the beast down with a spear nearly 14,000 years before.For 35 years Gustafson's discovery was ignored or ridiculed by the scientific establishment. Anthropology was stuck in a Clovis-first model, which stated that "Clovis people" predated humans ...