I’m trying to flesh out a story about prehistoric people (think late Stone Age, maybe early Bronze) who live in a somewhat arctic area where the main source of sustenance/hides/building material is mammoth.
I’ve looked online for information on how a typical mammoth hunt might have gone (with the understanding, of course, that no one alive today has ever actually been on one), but have found very little in the way of even speculation* on how it might have happened.
So, that being said, how might an actual hunt have gone? I assume, of course, that attacking an entire herd is probably a recipe for disaster and that a lone mammoth would have been a much easier target.
What sort of tactics would have been used? A direct assault with spears and/or javelins? Try to get the mammoth to fall into a pit trap (and if so, how would you get it to go to where the trap is)? Some other tactic that I’m not aware of?
I would assume that there is fair amount of meat (not to mention skin/bone/ivory and other usable material) on a mammoth? How would they have gotten the carcass (whole or divided) back to their encampment/residence?
Would the process of skinning/butchering a mammoth have been significantly different than doing so for a cow (size aside, of course).
If they were killing one to “stock up for winter” (would they have even done that?), how would they preserve the meat? Would they be able to salt it or turn it into jerky or the like in that sort of environment?
Is there anything else that I might have missed?
Thanks in advance,
Zev Steinhardt
I found one student’s paper on the subject, but when he described the mammoths as “czarist,” I had a nice chuckle and disregarded it.
I would expect a mammoth hunt to proceed somewhat like a whale hunt : find an isolated specimen or one that somehow got separated from the main pack, throw some javelins into it, fuck off before it reciprocates the favour, follow until it becomes separated from the pack again on account of its injuries, throw more harpoons (this time possibly with ropes attached for the whole tribe to pull on or tie big rocks to), etc… until it’s just too exhausted to go on, fight back or run away and just collapses.
I also expect they would cut the beast to pieces (field dress !) on the spot, since that’d be much easier than hauling its huge ass back to camp.
Salt is not necessary for meat preservation : you can also just smoke it. Wiki says of the smoking process :
Native Americans are said to have run bison off cliffs. E.g., Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. It’s possible that some similar approach could have worked with mammoths. Or you might just be conflating the two.
The modern equavalent would be asking how the bushmen of the Kalahari are able to bring down an elephant.
I can speculate that for mammoths, they would simply startle a heard and get them into a running panic, then chase them some ways until a weak individual could be separated from the herd, then just keep it running until it either overheated or drops from exhaustion, then spears. Keep in mind a human can keep running longer than a lot of large animals (altho not necessarily as fast). With a team of people working in concert, I can see it working that way. Kinda like wolves.
Maybe they drive a mammoth into a ditch, then spears. Again, speculation on my part.
I would also speculate that they would not try to carry the bounty back to camp, but would simply bring the camp to where the animal found it’s demise. Assuming, again, that the people were semi-nomadic.
My guess is you get about 20 guys and have them each carry a few decent size stones. Then you find an isolated mammoth and hope you can stone it to death before the others show up. Or you use Og Popeil’s Mam-o-matic.
This article says that humans targeted the biggest and most dominant males. If it’s true, it points to an obvious tactic: Harass the herd, while keeping a somewhat safe distance. Wait for the alpha bull to place himself between you and the herd (this way he singles himself out from the herd in an attempt to deal with the threat) and then use atlatls to take the isolated male down. No pit trap necessary.
Modern tribes that hunted elephants sometimes would sneak up and cut an achilles’ tendon or two before the beast knew they were there. Probably easier to do in savannah grass than a snow field, but it could probably be done with mammoth.
Given the bogginess of large areas of their range, I’d think about working a mammoth into a marshy spot until it sinks into some spongy ground. Makes it a lot harder for it to move around and charge. Throw spears from a distance. A tactic not available for the San.
I also suspect torches would be a big help in scaring game.
I can’t find a cite but I once read about a mammoth skeleton that had a spear point driven in between the neck vertebra in such away that it could only have gotten there if the spearman was* riding* the beast. :eek:
One way musk-ox were killed was by harassing the herd until it formed up into an instinctive defensive formation – mature animals on the outside forming a ring around the calves. This provides a great defense against predators like wolves, by guaranteeing that they have to go mano-a-mano with a bull instead of being able to pick off a calf. But it is not such a great defense against humans who can just keep throwing spears, essentially getting free hits indefinitely until the entire herd is down (and then could preserve the meat so that much kill was not wasted).
If mammoths had the same kind of defensive instincts, the same tactic could have been used.
In the New World the Clovis peoples and climate change (global warming as the current interglacial gathered steam) pushed the Pleistocene megafauna over the edge into extinction. The Clovis peoples were incredible hunters and masters of making and using stone weapons. It’s easy to envision a mammoth chasing a hat waving rodeo clown being ambushed by a dozen master killers each casting multiple spears and making short work of the brute. Butcher him up, smoke him, salt him, freeze him, ferment him, render the fat and mix it with nutmeats and berries, betcha get tired of mammoth before winter’s over…killing animals is easy for us, the problem has always been finding them. The journals of Lewis and Clark tell us a lot about just how lean winter can be for the hunter/gatherer.
