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The primitive folk assessed by many archaeologists as being the original native Americans – that is, the Clovis people – killed and ate the lovable prehistoric elephants that inhabited the continent alongside them, scientists say. The proto-dumbo species in question is known as the gomphothere. Until recently, it had been thought that gomphotheres had disappeared from North America well before human beings showed up, but new fossil evidence appears to show that at least one cuddly tusker was brutally killed by Clovis people around 13,400 years ago. The luckless pachyderm was then scoffed by its peckish assailants. "This is the...

The secret is out: Man and gomphotheres once coexisted in Sonora. Tools and spear tips found with fossil bones at a remote Sonoran site suggest that Clovis-era hunters butchered two juvenile specimens of the elephantlike megafauna about 13,000 years ago. It's the first discovery of such recent evidence of gomphotheres in North America, said Vance Holliday, a University of Arizona anthropologist. It's also the first time gomphothere fossils were found together with implements made by Clovis people, the oldest known inhabitants of North America, Holliday said. The discovery, on a remote ranch in the Rio Sonora watershed, was actually made...

The bed of artefacts in the state of Sonora in northwest Mexico also includes the bones of an extinct cousin of the mastodon called a gomphothere. The beast was probably hunted and killed by the Clovis people, known for their distinctive spear points, who mysteriously disappeared within about 500 years of leaving their first archeological traces. Intact Clovis camp sites and extensive evidence of hunting has been found across the United States, with the highest concentration of sites just north of the Mexican border, in the San Pedro River basin of southeastern Arizona. But relatively little is known about their...