Elephants, as we know them today, live exclusively in Africa and parts of Asia. Any ancestors they may have had traipsing North America were believed to have been long gone by the time humans arrived, but that’s apparently not the case: According to researchers at the University of Arizona, Clovis-era humans hunted the gomphothere, an early ancestor to the modern elephant here on American soil.

“This is the first archaeological gomphothere found in North America, and it’s the only one known,” said archaeologist Vance Holliday, a professor of anthropology and geology at the UA.

At first, the bones they discovered in Mexico didn’t appear noteworthy. They thought it may have been an ancient bison, as extinct bison were somewhat larger than the modern day variety. When they finally unearthed the mandible bones and teeth in 2008, they began to realize what they had found. The gomphothere was about the same size as the modern elephant.

The fact that the Clovis, the earliest widespread group of hunter-gatherers to inhabit North America, would have hunted gomphotheres isn’t entirely surprising – they were already known hunters of mammoths and mastodons, relatives of the gomphotheres. What’s surprising is that the gomphotheres were even available for hunting, seeing as how they were believed to have disappeared before humans arrived some some 13,000 to 13,500 years ago.

Dating back approximately 13,400 years, Holliday and his colleagues believe these gompotheres to be the last to have roamed North America. That date also happens to make the dig site one of the two oldest known Clovis sites in North America. They found seven spear points at the site, four of which were embedded among the bones, indicating that humans did in fact kill the two animals.

“This is the first Clovis gomphothere, it’s the first archaeological gomphothere found in North America, it’s the first evidence that people were hunting gomphotheres in North America, and it adds another item to the Clovis menu,” Holliday said.