Paleoindian Tradition

This period lies between the arrival of humans to America and the disappearance of the great mammals.

During the Paleoindian tradition, the human inhabitants were nomads. They had the extended family as their social nucleus. The tools they used were only worked stones to make projectile points, knifes, etc. They didn´t know either ceramics or agriculture. They subsisted from hunting the great mammals that lived in the rivers and lakes, killing them with lances provided with stone points. To this diet, they added smaller animals as well as the plants they collected in their travels.

Paleoindians in the Nogales Region

When man arrives for the first time in today´s Nogales region, all Northern Sonora valleys had a colder and more humid climate than today, and were covered with shallow lakes from which a fauna of mammooths and other great mammals lived. These animals fed from the vegetation of this region: forests and prairies.

Several remains of mammooths asociated with human activity, such as Clovis points, have been found in Arizona. The sites were located near Naco, and in the Lehner site (the Image to the right. You can click on it to see a larger one). These remains were dated between 10,410 and 11,600 years ago.

By then, the hills around Nogales were covered with oaks and some conifers, while a prairie painted the ground.

The centuries would again go by, and with the growing aridity and recomposition of the flora and fauna, the first americans gradually saw how those great mammals on which they had fed, started disappearing.

In the arroyos like the one that crosses nogales, the ponds and swamps also started disappearing, leaving only small valleys stretching between the hills.

This forced those human beings, also gradually, to start supplementing their diet with other, smaller animals and more plants, as well as seeds.