clovis

Compare the Clovis culture of the Lithic stage to the Aztecs of the Post-Classic stage.

There are various presumed Clovis sites which are now underwater in TN, as well.

It survived the widespread recognition of pre-clovis cultures with sites like Monte Verde (~13ka) because the dates hadn't been refined to where they are today.

The Clovis are indeed important but they no longer exist.

There's apparently been a growing movement to paint Clovis culture as primarily relying on plants and smaller animals in spite of the existing evidence so this confirms the traditional view.

Add to that the Clovis culture in the eastern USA and I'd say people have been in eastern US/Canada many times over the last few thousand years, before the native people arrived.

If you were to ask a villager in current France under the (elected) Clovis rule - 5 years before Rome is sacked - if his great grandfather was better off 50 years earlier under a roman militaristic region governor?

For context: the French and the German have been alternatively at war and allies since the times of Clovis and Charlemagne, a millenium before Bismark made modern Germany a thing (in occupied Versailles, in what was perfectly calibrated to be a complete French humiliation).

Meanwhile tribes have been saying “that’s not how it happened” to the Clovis hypothesis the entire time.

> “The focus on mammoths helps explain how Clovis people could spread throughout North America and into South America in just a few hundred years,” I never understood this.

Clovis first has been largely rejected for about 30 years now but the old narratives keep floating around.

On one of the gates of the cathedral, the List of the French kings was engraved, starting with Clovis.

Well, Diamond is still a fervent believer in Clovis-First, despite the entire anthropological community having disavowed that theory about two decades ago.