Palaeo-Indian Way of Life

During much of the last 90,000 years, Ontario has been covered in thick ice sheets of the Wisconsinan glaciation. By 12,000 years ago, the ice sheets began to retreat and a series of large pro-glacial lakes formed between the land to the south, and the edge of the ice. As people followed the retreating ice, they were attracted to the rich environment along the lakes shores. Many of the earliest Palaeo-Indian sites in Ontario have been found …

…were made by retouching a suitable flake, or by reworking a broken projectile point. People of the Late Palaeo-Indian period also used a wide variety of unifacially flaked tools. These included small end and side scrapers, long, concave side-scrapers and a number of larger tools made by touching up the naturally sharp edge of large random flakes. The technique of making stone tools using biface reduction was used extensively by Late Palaeo-Indian people in Ontario