A moment frozen in mud
On the floor of the St. Mary Reservoir in southern Alberta, intense winds have scoured away modern sediments to reveal a scene from the end of the last Ice Age. The Wally's Beach site contains an extraordinary collection of fossilized footprints, preserving a geological instant from approximately 13,300 years ago. The tracks belong to the great megafauna of the Pleistocene epoch: woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), western camels (Camelops hesternus), and ancient horses (Equus conversidens).
These animals walked across a muddy and windswept plain near a large proglacial lake. Their footprints, left in the soft earth, were quickly buried and preserved. Today, these trace fossils show the behavior and interactions of these extinct creatures. The scientific study of such traces, ichnology, allows researchers to reconstruct movement, speed, and even social dynamics. For example, analysis of mammoth tracks at the site indicates a typical walking speed of four to five kilometers per hour. The collection of prints at Wally's Beach is the only known Pleistocene-era trackway site in Canada.
The hunter and the hunted
Among the thousands of animal prints, another set of tracks tells a more complex story: those of a human hunter. The human footprints are found directly overlapping a mammoth trackway, clear evidence of a person stalking this massive prey. The age of the site aligns with the presence of Clovis people, a Paleo-Indian culture known for their distinctive fluted stone spear points used to hunt big game. Radiocarbon dating of animal bones from kill and butchering sites at Wally's Beach confirms human activity here dates back 13,300 years.
While Clovis points have been found in the area, the most direct evidence of hunting comes from the butchered remains of seven horses and one camel. These finds represent the only certain evidence for prehistoric human hunting of horse and camel in the Americas. The presence of human hunters interacting with a diverse set of megafauna shows life just as the continental ice sheets were in their final retreat. The data from Wally's Beach suggests humans were present in this area before the ice-free corridor along the Rocky Mountains was fully established. Analysis of the mammoth trackways also reveals a relative absence of juvenile animals, which may suggest the local mammoth population was already stressed and in decline.