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The Paleoindian period is the earliest firmly established era of human activity in the New World (10,000 - 6,000 B.C). Although no direct evidence has yet been discovered in the Sioux Falls area, the fact that Paleoindian artifacts, such as Clovis and Folsom spear points, are distributed widely across North America, indicates these nomadic big game hunters crossed this area. A surface collected fluted point (Clovis/Folsom) has been recovered from near Mitchell, SD.
Glaciers, which covered the landscape with ice up to one mile thick, were retreating. The climate was cooler and wetter than today; plant and animal communities were quite different
Subsistence activities focused upon hunting of large game animals, including now-extinct mammoths, mastodon, and giant long-horned bison.
The first Clovis site in South Dakota was discovered in the late 1970s in Shannon County. This site, the Lange-Ferguson Site, represents the butchering of an Imperial Mammoth. This animal stood 14 feet high at the front shoulder and weighed approximately 9 tons (18,000 lbs).
An isolated late Paleoindian spear point and a chert knife were recovered from a dry slough bed at the Trasta-Moberg-Hall site in Brookings County, while a Folsom point was documented at the Winter site in Deuel County. In Northwestern Iowa, the Cherokee Sewer Site and the Simonsen Site both date to ca. 8400 BC, and both reflect heavy dependence on bison hunting. However, the projectile points from these two sites are different, the former reflecting late Paleoindian lanceolate forms, the latter side-notched points of the Early Plains Archaic.
The end of the Paleoindian era is associated with the extinction of many big game species as the last Pleistocene ice age gave way to the modern climates of the Holocene.