Archaeologists working high in Montana's Beartooth Mountains have uncovered what may be the oldest and highest-known human habitation sites in North America — Clovis-era artifacts found roughly 9,000 feet up, in terrain that textbooks said was buried under glacial ice 13,000 years ago.

The story began in 1968, when construction workers unearthed the 'Clovis Child' at the Anzick site near Bozeman. Dating by Texas A&M's Center for the Study of the First Americans, with Oxford and Stafford Research, put the burial and its roughly 100 stone artifacts between 12,725 and 12,900 years ago — still the oldest known Clovis burial in North America.

The new evidence comes from a collection amassed by a former game warden between the 1950s and 1970s, and from artifacts exposed after a 2022 rain and snow event reshuffled sediment high in the Beartooths. Archaeologist Scott Dersam told Mountain Journal that the assemblage is now the largest and densest high-elevation lithic collection anywhere in North America.

The problem is that it should not exist. The surrounding ecosystem was thought to have been covered by the Pinedale Glacier, and Clovis people are usually pictured hunting mammoth on the open plains.

'We could have the oldest Clovis sites in North America here, and it happens to be in a place that shouldn't exist in an ecosystem that shouldn't exist,' Dersam said. 'It's more than a monkey wrench to the current paradigm. It's a full kick to the chest.'

The Clovis culture, named for its distinctive grooved spear points, is the first widespread prehistoric culture documented in North America. If the high-country sites hold up to further dating and excavation, they would push human use of alpine terrain back by millennia — and force a rethink of how much of the Rocky Mountains was actually locked under ice when the first Americans spread across the continent.

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