This video player uses Microsoft Silverlight.

Time Frame: Approximately 12,000 Years Ago

Approximately 12,000 years ago ancient people of Iowa used rocks, bones and tree branches to make tools.

“First People of the Prairies,” The Iowa Heritage: Program # 1, Iowa Public Television, 1979.

Archeologists have found that people of ancient Iowa lived in family groups. They moved their camps often following the animal herds that were their source of food. They made their primitive tools and weapons from the natural materials they found near their camps: branches of the trees, the bones of animals, the stone and flint that lay upon the ground. Chipping one stone against the other, the hunters of ancient Iowa made their scrappers, spear points and knives: sharp edges were formed, notches dulled, groves made. And as man chipped away smaller flakes of stone fell to the earth, often unused. Over thousands of years, these waste products were buried by layers of soil.