13,000 year old sewing needles

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/science/ancient-needles-discovery-wyoming/index.html
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0313610
The claim is that it would have been 5 to 7 degrees C colder than today, and that the Clovis people would have needed the needles to sew hides together tightly.  This doesn't make sense because it looks like the needles were likely only around 3 mm wide at their stoutest point and had a finer tip.  It doesn't seem to be something that you can force through the tanned hide of even something like a fox or rabbit.  They would still need an awl to make the holes to pass the thin needle through.  The needles were over 5 cm in length.  The research paper claims that these needles could be used to sew hides together, but shouldn't someone try to do it.  They are narrow enough so that the stiching holes can be spaced closer together, but could they reliably make the thousands of holes needed to piece together a hide garment? The holes that they would make are still pretty large for fine sewing of a hide.  The inuit bone needles that I have seen might have been narrower than these (probably no more than 3 mm wide), but inuits also used awls.  They were sewing together seal and caribou skins and furs.
Ron Okimoto