His education was cut short when World War II began and he decided to enlist in the United States Navy.
He served in the amphibious forces of the South Pacific during World War II, and received an honorable discharge in 1946 to return to Ten Sleep to work on the family ranch.
In 1952 George discovered a hidden cave full of atlatl and dart fragments, which were used by ancient American hunters as spear throwers, and took them to local archaeologist Dr. William Mulloy.
While attending a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver in 1961, Frison learned that in order to succeed with an academic career in archaeology, he must have a formal university education.
In 1964 George Frison received a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in anthropology from the University of Wyoming (Vittitow 2006).
George Frison's main focus of research had been the Paleoindian mammoth hunters of prehistoric North America beginning over 11,500 years ago (Vittitow 2006).
He had studied mammoth hunting culture, mainly from the tools and bones left behind, across the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Africa, and the former Soviet Union.
Frison strongly advocated realistic experimentation with ancient tools, so he experimented in Zimbabwe, with modern-made Clovis points on dead and dying elephants, that were culled to get rid of excess numbers.
He found that the Clovis tools were not only adequate, but very successful in penetrating the hide and ribcage of an African elephant, and quite possibly a mammoth as well.
It has been a popular notion that early American hunters killed off the large game, such as mammoths, that inhabited North America in the Late Pleistocene (Alroy 2001, Grayson 1977).
Frison hypothesized that there would be no incentive to kill more animals that one would need, and that the real cause of the late Pleistocene megafaunal mass extinction was climate, not humans (Vittitow 2006).
Frison also believed that the modern counterparts of extinct North American species such as horses, elephants, and camels, are potential and plausible subjects of study and speculation for scientists, and that studies such as the Zimbabwe Clovis experiment on elephants should continue, being necessary part of gaining understanding of behavioral patterns, as well as procurement strategies of past cultures (Frison 2004).