At the end of the last Ice Age, Iowa had a cool, wet climate and widespread coniferous forests. Their tools included lance-shaped spear points and specialized butchering tools. They often used high-quality raw materials obtained from distant sources.
Paleoindian sites are rare, partly because population density was probably low.
Later Paleoindian points have a wider distribution. The best documented Paleoindian site in Iowa is the Rummells-Maske site in Cedar County, a cache of Clovis points recovered from a plowed field. Because Paleoindian sites are so rare in Iowa, interpretations of settlement patterns, subsistence systems, and other lifeways rely on comparisons to other parts of the country. By 8500 BC, climatic change and large-mammal extinctions helped cause cultural changes marking the shift to the Archaic lifeways. Environmental change occurred rapidly, with the expansion of prairie and then deciduous forests.