If we place ourselves in the moccasins of those early humans, we can’t fault them. They had no satellite surveillance and so had no idea just how many mammoths wandered the earth. They could only see as far as their horizon. Perhaps they thought mammoths would just appear forever, whenever they needed them, from a place of mystery. Their ‘scientists’ were busy developing more advanced tools and weapons. I doubt that they had a great many zoologists.
Original column: Why did paleolithic humans hunt mammoths?
Another hypothesis is that the domestication of dogs made mammoth hunting more practical, opening up a food resource that hadn’t previously been available.
I’m inclined to think it was a combination of things: improved hunting tech (including use of dogs if that happened), loss of mammoth habitat with climate change, possibly other stuff. Humans hunting them was one factor but not the whole story.
In North America, almost certainly. I’ve seen contrary interpretations, but the precipitious decline of large species here is almost entirely coincident with the spread of humans.
As for Asia, the larger human population, coupled with the possibility that mammoths reproduced no more quickly or easily than elephants - maybe more slowly, given their adaptation to colder climate - and climate change itself all added up to extinction. Since mammoth butchery sites are comparatively plentiful, we can assume the hunting was widespread and continuous.
At least in the case of the Pygmy Mammoth, on California’s Channel Islands, it’s not entirely clear humans are linked to their extinction, but there seems to be stronger evidence that climate change and rising sea levels disrupted their environment enough to kill them all off.
The coastal environment may have offered enough other sources of food for people, so going after a large-ish animal may have been more trouble than it’s worth. That may not have been the case for northern plains/central Asian residents, however.
“University of Michigan paleontologist show fresh-butchered meat could be stored in a peat bog for up to two years.”
So who ate the peat meat to make sure it was good?
The original re-peating food.
Maybe Pete ate it.
Primitive humans weren’t necessarily the romanticized “noble savages” that some us were taught to think. We were taught to believe, for example, that Plains Indians only killed what they needed and efficiently made good use of every part of that buffalo, from the meat to the bones to the hide.
Not so fast. They also hunted buffalo by setting grass fires behind a herd and stampeding the whole herd off a cliff. Then they could pick a few dead buffalo from the pile for their needs, leaving the rest to rot.
I learned this in an Intro Anthropology class I took about 25 years ago.
I agree with this, because rarely, if ever, do you find just one reason for a particular event. Usually it’s a combination of things.
Interesting that Cecil mentions a Michigan paleontologist. I attended a fascinating lecture some years ago by a Michigan paleontologist who believed that humans did kill off mastodons, at least in the local area.
Given that humans never hunted elephants to extinction in either Africa or Asia (not just yet anyway), I agree that it must have been either 1) a combination of factors in addition to predation by humans or 2) mammoth psychology left them totally clueless about humans.
2 is a possibility, though. In a documented example from the Americas, we’re told that bison didn’t see gunshots as a threat. When one dropped dead, the rest looked around for a threat, didn’t see any predators nearby and went back to grazing. Thus a hunter could shoot as many as he wanted before collecting the skins. If mammoths had a similar behavioral failing that stone age man could exploit, they’d be easy pickings.
As for theories that man didn’t cause the extinctions at all: I find that hard to believe. The timing is too closely related for some of those extinctions to be unrelated events.
The theory is that the Proboscidea in Africa, and to an extent in India, were exposed to hominids long ago enough that as humans slowly evolved into better hunters, the elephants had enough time to evolve in response. By contrast the mammoths had less time and were faced with much more capable hunters as their first exposure. Certainly more large animals survived in Africa and India than elsewhere.
One of the competing theories in Aus is that the spread of humans and the extinction of mega-fauna are coincident with climate change.
Exactly this happened to the elephant seals. In contrast to harbor seals (who dive into the water en masse at the first sight of any human nearby), elephant seals just lie there for the pickens. They were quickly hunted to extinction towards the end of the 19th century. Well, they were thought to be extinct. Then an expedition found a remnant of a population on one of the islands out there. (You’ll have to search for the details.) Brilliantly, they shot the last few to take their skins and bones back to England to put in a museum, which is of course where the last few survivors of any species belong. :smack: But, it turned out, there was another small group of them on the far side of the island that the expedition didn’t find. From that small remnant, the entire current population of Northern elephant seals re-grew.
However, that means they are genetically bottlenecked. With the large current population descending from just a few individuals, they are substantially all clones of one another, with very little genetic diversity among them. Thus, if any environmental condition should arise that they can’t handle, it will threaten the entire population. Thus, for all their large numbers today, they are still on the brink of extinction.
However, the arrival of humans in Australia predated their arrival in the Americas by something like 25,000 years. So if climate change was responsible in Australia, it would seemingly have to be a very localized effect, since megafauna elsewhere in the world were unaffected. They only went extinct in these other areas after the arrival of modern humans.
If mammoths were like modern elephants their incredibly long gestation period, 22 months producing a single offspring, is one major factor in their decline. They just couldn’t produce enough offspring to replace their losses.
Which makes me wonder if elephant-like species that lived when saber-toothed cats were around had higher reproduction rates, because they were under predation pressure modern elephants aren’t.
We’ve had several threads before about what if humans traveled back in time and lived in the age of dinosaurs. It occurs to me that in such a situation people might never have bothered to invent farming. Because they had large predators, herbivorous dinosaurs averaged 10x the weight of comparable mammals and presumably laid clutches of eggs to replace steady losses. Hunting might be so bountiful that humans could live off it indefinitely without exhausting the game. In addition, farming wouldn’t be practical if herds of 5-tonne browsers regularly came through eating everything in sight. Not to even mention that humans might themselves might be under enough predation threat themselves to limit overpopulation.
<fringe theory>
Of course the normal and natural conclusion from the evidence is that humans chased down and killed every single North American horse across the entire continent, every vale, every forest, every canyon. With the advanced technology and sophisticated stone tools, it should not give anyone pause that humans managed to slaughter off an amazing wide variety of megafauna, and to have completed such a slaughter all at about the exact same time, 12,700 years ago.
As humans tend to be creatures of habit, it is completely logical that once all the megafauna were extinct the humans quickly starved to death being unable to think of anything else to eat … I can imagine our paleohunters pushing through a mule deer herd looking of the mammoth they’re hiding. So failing to be able to hunt and kill elk and bison with spears designed for bigger animals, the various human cultures quickly, and I do mean immediately, collapsed, 12,700 years ago.
I say there’s at least a 5% inconsistency with the above conventional wisdom, and also it’s a fact that a comet impact would leave very little if any evidence behind, so that we definitely have a solid case for a crackpot theory:
It was a comet that wiped out the megafauna and the Clovis culture, at the same time. ||
</fringe theory>