[5] It is generally agreed that these groups were reliant on hunting big game (megafauna),[6] having a particularly strong association with mammoths, and to a lesser extent with mastodon, gomphothere, bison, and horse,[7][8] but they also consumed smaller animals and plants.

[7] Only one human burial has been directly associated with tools from the Clovis culture: Anzick-1, a young boy found buried in Montana,[9][10][11] who has a close genetic relation to some modern Native American populations, primarily in Central and South America.

[24] In 1929, 19-year-old Ridgely Whiteman, who had been closely following the excavations in nearby Folsom in the newspapers, discovered the Clovis site near the Blackwater Draw in eastern New Mexico.

[25] The American Journal of Archaeology, in its January–March 1932 edition, mentions Howard's work in Burnet Cave, including the discovery of extinct fauna and a "Folsom type" point 4 ft below a Basketmaker burial.

[26] The Dent site in Colorado was the first known association of Clovis points with mammoth bones, as noted by Hannah Marie Wormington in her book Ancient Man in North America (4th ed.

[27] Gary Haynes, in his book The Early Settlement of North America, suggested the type of fluted point thereafter associated with megafauna (especially mammoths) at over a dozen other archaeological sites in North America would have been more appropriately named "Dent" rather than Clovis, the town near Blackwater Draw that gave the type of point its name.

[6] Other elements considered distinctive of the Clovis culture tool complex include "raw material selectivity; distinctive patterns of flake and blade platform preparation, thinning and flaking; characteristic biface size and morphology, including the presence of end-thinning; and the size, curvature and reduction strategies of blades".

[35][36] Wear on Clovis points indicates that they were multifunctional objects that also served as cutting and slicing tools, with some authors suggesting that some Clovis-point types were primarily used as knives.

The fluting may have served to make the finished points more durable during use by acting as a "shock absorber" to redistribute stress during impact, though others have suggested that it may have been purely stylistic or used to strengthen the hafting to the spear handle.

[14] Clovis blades—long flakes removed from specially prepared conical or wedge-shaped cores—are part of the global Upper Paleolithic blade tradition.

[6] A distinctive feature of the Clovis culture generally not found in subsequent cultures is "caching", where a collection of artifacts (typically stone tools, such as Clovis points or bifaces) were deliberately left at a location, presumably with the intention to return to collect them later, though some authors have interpreted cache deposits as ritual behavior.

[4] A few Clovis culture artifacts are suspected to reflect creative expression, such as rock art, the use of red ocher, and engraved stones.

[46] Clovis peoples, like other Paleoindian cultures, used red ocher for a variety of artistic and ritual purposes, including burials,[47] and to cover objects in caches.

[49] Clovis hunter-gatherers are characterized as "high-technology foragers" who utilized sophisticated technology to maintain access to resources under conditions of high mobility.

[52] Clovis artifacts have often been found associated with big game, including proboscideans (Columbian mammoth, mastodon,[7] and the gomphothere Cuvieronius[8]) bison,[7] and equines of the genus Equus.

[53] A handful of sites possibly suggest the hunting of caribou/reindeer, peccaries (Platygonus, Mylohyus), ground sloths (Paramylodon), glyptodonts (Glyptotherium), tapirs, the camel Camelops, and the llama Hemiauchenia.

[52] It is generally agreed that the people who produced the Clovis culture were reliant on big game for a significant portion of their diet, while also consuming smaller animals and plants,[6] though some authors have argued for a generalist hunter-gatherer lifestyle that also involved the occasional targeting of megafauna.

In the southeast, Clovis peoples created large camps that may have served as "staging areas", which may have been seasonally occupied, where a number of bands may have gathered for social occasions.

[61] The timing of megafauna extinction in North America also coincides with major climatic changes, making it difficult to disentangle the effects of various factors.

[64] Sequencing of his genome demonstrates that he belonged to a population that is ancestral to many contemporary Indigenous peoples of the Americas,[13] particularly those from Central and South America, and less related to those from contemporary North America, including northern Mexico,[13][65] though there is considerable variability in the genetic closeness of Central and South American indigenous peoples to Anzick-1, with older ancient South American remains generally being closer, suggesting that the Native American population had already diverged into multiple genetically distinct groups by the time of the Clovis culture, followed by subsequent migration of these populations later in the Holocene.

[13] Some authors have suggested that the Clovis culture lasted for a relatively short period of a few centuries, with a 2020 study suggesting a temporal range, based on ten securely radiocarbon-dated Clovis sites, of 13,050 to 12,750 calibrated years BP, ending subsequent to the onset of the Younger Dryas,[1] consistent with the results obtained in a 2007 study by the same authors.

[1] The area of its origin remains unclear, though the development of fluted Clovis points appears to have occurred in North America south of the Laurentide Ice Sheet and not in Beringia.