# How Did People Hunt Mammoth? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 11, 2013, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110 "2013-12-11T22:00:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2013, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/41 "2013-12-13T19:45:59Z")
> [@Xema](#): > > Any cite for this? > > I’d be interested to hear when & where it was used to hunt land animals. Clovis hunters evidently used a [detachable foreshaft on their spears.](http://www.pbs.org/saf/1406/features/huntingf.htm) I wouldn’t, however, refer to them as harpoons. Some harpoons also have detachable heads, but not all do. ---
**Author:** ![ThisOneGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c0e974/32.png) [@ThisOneGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThisOneGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2013, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/42 "2013-12-13T22:33:06Z")
In the tribal visitor’s center in Carmacks, Yukon, they had a diorama explaining the way their oral history said mammoths were hunted. There would be fences leading the mammoth to walk through a series of rope loops tied to trees that were partially cut down. The mammoth would break the tree all the way down and be left pulling several logs, slowing it down enough that people could then spear it. As the oral history also reported that mammoths ate humans, I’ll let you decide how much to trust it. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2013, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/43 "2013-12-13T22:35:52Z")
> [@ThisOneGuy](#): > > In the tribal visitor’s center in Carmacks, Yukon, they had a diorama explaining the way their oral history said mammoths were hunted. There would be fences leading the mammoth to walk through a series of rope loops tied to trees that were partially cut down. The mammoth would break the tree all the way down and be left pulling several logs, slowing it down enough that people could then spear it. > As the oral history also reported that mammoths ate humans, I’ll let you decide how much to trust it. Did the oral history include Ewoks, by any chance ? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2013, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/44 "2013-12-13T23:18:00Z")
> [@slowlearner](#): > > 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. . There’s actually no evidence of the Clovis people pushing the North American megafauna into extinction. There’s maybe a dozen mammoth kill sites in the USA (one has about a dozen very young mammoth, another has two, etc, compared with multiple sites each with hundreds if not thousands of kills in Europe, including those with the bones stacked like cordwood according to type. In some cases, they made homes from the bones This was apparently done by traps and stampeding. Climate change shrunk mammoth habitat extensively: (wiki)”_A 2008 study estimated that changes in climate shrank suitable mammoth habitat from 7,700,000 km2 (3,000,000 sq mi) 42,000 years ago to 800,000 km2 (310,000 sq mi) 6,000 years ago.”_ _“The argument that human hunters were responsible for the extinction of a wide variety of large Pleistocene mammals emerged in western Europe during the 1860s, alongside the recognition that people had coexisted with those mammals. Today, the overkill position is rejected for western Europe but lives on in Australia and North America. The survival of this hypothesis is due almost entirely to Paul Martin, the architect of the first detailed version of it. In North America, archaeologists and paleontologists whose work focuses on the late Pleistocene routinely reject Martin’s position for two prime reasons: there is virtually no evidence that supports it, and there is a remarkably broad set of evidence that strongly suggests that it is wrong. In response, Martin asserts that the overkill model predicts a lack of supporting evidence, thus turning the absence of empirical support into support for his beliefs. We suggest that this feature of the overkill position removes the hypothesis from the realm of science and places it squarely in the realm of faith. One may or may not believe in the overkill position, but one should not confuse it with a scientific hypothesis about the nature of the North American past.”_ > **[A requiem for North American overkill](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440302002054)** > > The argument that human hunters were responsible for the extinction of a wide variety of large Pleistocene mammals emerged in western Europe during th… However, some do think that the Mammoth was thus significantly declined in population, but Humans put the final nail in the coffin, so you may have a point: [http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0060079](http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0060079) _Results show a dramatic decline in suitable climate conditions for the mammoth between the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene, with hospitable areas in the mid-Holocene being restricted mainly to Arctic Siberia, where the latest records of woolly mammoths in continental Asia have been found. The population model results also support the view that the collapse of the climatically suitable area caused a significant drop in mammoth population size, making the animals more vulnerable to increasing hunting pressure from expanding human populations. The coincidence of the collapse of climatically suitable areas and the increase in anthropogenic impacts in the Holocene are most likely to have been the “coup de grâce,” which set the place and time for the extinction of the woolly mammoth._ ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2013, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/45 "2013-12-13T23:22:29Z")
The _Clan of the Cave Bear_ series has one or two descriptions of a mammoth hunt. Jean Auel reportedly tried to research that for accuracy. ---
**Author:** ![dogbutler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dogbutler/32/428_2.png) [@dogbutler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dogbutler)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/46 "2013-12-14T04:40:55Z")
The hit it in [this](http://66.147.244.222/~coachtw4/ridgehead/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/image.png) spot. ---
**Author:** ![johnpost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f17d59/32.png) [@johnpost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/johnpost)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/47 "2013-12-14T04:58:46Z")
it was difficult. they never did master doing calls and setting decoys. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/48 "2013-12-14T05:56:59Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > **zev** didn’t say “store food,” he said “stock up for winter.” Can you explain the difference, because I honestly don’t see it. What does “stocking up for winter” consist of if not storing food. > [@](#): > > If we consider the Plains Indians as a model, they made as much buffalo jerky and pemmican as they could after a successful hunt. They preserved meat by cutting it in thin strips and drying it in the sun or over a fire. If they had to move, they would carry as much with them as they could manage. During the winter, they would break up into small bands and make camp, where they would subsist on whatever food they had been able to preserve… How is this not storing food?😕 Of course the plains Indians, by the time the Europeans encountered them, were virtually all herders, ie agriculturalists. And they were the descendants of people who had been agriculturalists for millennia. The plains Indians who were actual HGS, as in no horses and who were probably the descendants of the original HGs, pushed out by the agriculturalists once they got horses, didn’t store food to the best of my knowledge. > [@](#): > > It’s very likely that after a successful hunt mammoth hunters would gorge themselves on fresh meat for several days, while at the same time preserving as much meat as they could carry with them to use later. What is that based on? Do we have any evidence of them doing so? Do we have any evidence of observed HG groups storing food in this manner? It’s always very hard to know people did in the past. The only recent HG group hat stored food in any quantity that I am aware of were the village dwellers of the Pacific NW. Of course this was an anomalous group in an anomalous environment, descendant of agriculturalists and still practicing agriculture on a small scale. And we can assume that the incipient agriculturalists probably stored food while still HGs. But do we have any evidence of full-time HGs storing food in the manner that you describe? As in preserving meat from individual kills to carry with them? ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 6:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/49 "2013-12-14T06:52:16Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Of course the plains Indians, by the time the Europeans encountered them, were virtually all herders, ie agriculturalists. And they were the descendants of people who had been agriculturalists for millennia. But they weren’t any more, were they ? They still did \*some \*agriculture on the side, but thanks to horses (which IIRC got to them before the Europeans, via trade with the more settled Indian nations of the east) they had found better living following the bison herds all around the place throughout the year, which mitigated the traditional issues of their previously more settled agricultural lifestyles, i.e. some years are bad, and those’re _very_ bad. But they didn’t really store or stockpile surplus food from one year to the next as purely agricultural+herding groups tend to do (precisely because some years are leaner than others) ; just enough to make it comfortably through the coming winter when it’d be too cold to be out hunting - because that’s all they needed. Soon as spring was back they’d be following bison again which would allow them to eat like kings once more, 100% of the years. And you can’t really take a grain/bean/squash storehouse with you when you’re being all horses and tents anyway, can you ? 😉 That’s how I read the distinction **Colibri** ’s pointing out, at least. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 7:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/50 "2013-12-14T07:03:39Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > But they weren’t any more, were they ? They still did \*some \*agriculture on the side, but thanks to horses (which IIRC got to them before the Europeans, via trade with the more settled Indian nations of the east) they had found better living following the bison herds all around the place throughout the year, which mitigated the traditional issues of their previously more settled agricultural lifestyles, i.e. some years are bad, and those’re _very_ bad. I think that **Blake** somehow is trying to say that the Plains Indians were herders because they had herds of horses - and then further calling them agriculturalists because they were herders. Of course this not is the usual use of the word agriculturalist. The Plains Indians primarily hunted for their main source of the food, the buffalo, and so were hunter gatherers. They did not herd buffalo, even if they kept herds of horses for the purpose of hunting. Of course if **Blake** is alleging that “stocking up for the winter” is the same as storing food then he’s wrong that hunter gatherers didn’t store food, because the Plains Indians certainly did so. Regarding evidence that Clovis peoples stored and cached meat for use during the winter, see _Paleo-Indian Winter Subsistence Strategies on the High Plain_s by George C. Frison, pp. 193-201 in [this volume](http://www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontributions/Anthropology/pdf_lo/SCtA-0030.pdf) Frison suggests that unlike the recent Plains Indians, who preserved meat for the winter by drying, Paleo-Indians cached frozen meat. > [@](#): > > ABSTRACT > This paper suggests that Paleo-Indians utilized caches of frozen meat to survive the harsh winters of the Northern Plains. To keep the meat from spoiling, the Indians necessarily had to kill the bison in late fall or early winter. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/51 "2013-12-14T13:37:44Z")
This is apparently how they did it. [http://66.147.244.222/~coachtw4/ridgehead/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/image.png](http://66.147.244.222/~coachtw4/ridgehead/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/image.png) IIRC the plains Indians got horses from the south, via the Spanish. That was a lot easier than getting them over the Appalachians, and 100 year head start. The plains Indians were nomads, following the buffalo herds. Agriculture was a waste of time if a herd 30 miles long was liable to wander across the fields, and the plains were subject to cyclical droughts that made crops unreliable. Raising domestic work animals (horses) does not make a people agriculturalists, and I don’t recall that eating horse was a common trait. Eating your workhorse (literally) would be as unthinkably desperate as eating your seed grain. Explorers to untouched lands (i.e. Darwin at the Galapagos is a good example) describe animals unfamiliar with humans who do not recognize them as a threat. While birds or rodents might be numerous enough to survive long enough to acquire skittishness as a trait, the megafauna of the new world likely did not have the breeding cycles to select for caution before they were all slaughtered. The fact that the animals were there when humans arrived and gone not long after - suggests there was at least a contribution to the result. The massive bone finds in Europe just mean that the animals over there were more cautions - like the other megafauna of Africa and Eurasia, the elephants and wildebeests that survive to today, they were cautions enough that they would survive until much larger human populations, and disappearing habitat did them in. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/52 "2013-12-14T14:16:46Z")
There were a _lot_ of settled, agricultural people in the US Great Plains before the arrival of the horse. Mainly in the river valley areas. They outnumbered the nomadic tribes since farming could sustain a larger population. The introduction of the horse gave the nomadic people a huge advantage in terms of raiding ability and turned things around. And HG doesn’t necessarily mean nomadic. The coastal tribes of the PNW lived a very fairly settled life and didn’t practice much agriculture. (They’d burn off areas where camas tubers would grow to keep the area forest-free and things like that.) But even the Intermountain tribes would travel hundreds of miles to the Columbia to catch and smoke salmon which would be their principal food during the winter. In addition to smoking food, Native Americans were also big on dried meats. It was a major ingredient in pemmican. There are a lot of places in the western US where food of some type (fish, buffalo, nuts, shellfish, etc.) in a given area at a given time. People would show up, collect it and take it with them. No big deal. Tribes in Idaho would send hunting parties east of the Rockies to hunt and bring back buffalo. While recorded in post-horse years, the traditional lore indicated it went on before the horse. So hauling large volumes of preserved mammoth around for months at a time is no biggie. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/53 "2013-12-14T16:44:22Z")
> [@ftg](#): > > In addition to smoking food, Native Americans were also big on dried meats. It was a major ingredient in pemmican. Palatable, good source of fat to avoid ‘rabbit sickness’ and vitamins - and a reasonably complete meal in a single greasy meaty fruity lump. We cheat and run unflavored ground beef jerky, tallow and fruit leather made of cranberries and strawberries through a meat grinder and form it into 2 oz [pemmican pucks](http://3219a2.medialib.glogster.com/media/8e/8e72ed7d6a7518598b0fb657d8d2581cae82536b169fca4f1e925b5f3dd94345/pemmican.jpg). They are great as a meal replacement though I do admit I really would not prefer to live on them entirely over the winter however they are more palatable than they sound. It really is a pity that Americans have gotten out of the whole fruit is never meant to go with meat mindset. Nomads have a long tradition for preserving meat - bstirma is originally mongolian - a heavily spiced dried hunk of meat [beef, cow, yak, whatever] that could be turned into a rough stew by hacking off chunks and boiling them up in water. [I baffled a visitor because a [bstirma](http://howto.gd/pic/18/00/00.jpg) looks like a slab of wood, they were wondering why I had a plank in my meat drawer:smack::p] Even a good [meaty fish](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Dried_salmon_in_Ainu_museum_%E3%82%B5%E3%83%83%E3%83%81%E3%82%A7%E3%83%97%28%E5%B9%B2%E3%81%97%E9%AE%AD%29_Sacchep.jpg) makes a nice plank of meat to store in a saddlebag. Air and sun drying, as well as smoking are a very natural first preservation technique - you dress out something and ride off with a slab of it hanging off your saddle, you end up with a nice sun and wind dried hunk of critter. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/54 "2013-12-14T17:00:38Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > This is apparently how they did it. > [http://66.147.244.222/~coachtw4/ridgehead/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/image.png](http://66.147.244.222/~coachtw4/ridgehead/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/image.png) > > IIRC the plains Indians got horses from the south, via the Spanish. That was a lot easier than getting them over the Appalachians, and 100 year head start. > > The plains Indians were nomads, following the buffalo herds. Agriculture was a waste of time if a herd 30 miles long was liable to wander across the fields… [That is incorrect.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_on_the_prehistoric_Great_Plains) The plains indians were mostly farmers who also hunted. The nomadic lifestyle of Indians such as the Lakota came later. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/55 "2013-12-14T18:01:48Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > [That is incorrect.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_on_the_prehistoric_Great_Plains) The plains indians were mostly farmers who also hunted. The nomadic lifestyle of Indians such as the Lakota came later. Just to be clear and to sum up what has been been said before, prior to direct European contact most Indian groups that lived on the Great Plains were agriculturalists who farmed in river valleys. After they acquired the horse, which happened before direct contact with Europeans, some became nomadic hunters following the buffalo herds (although some might have continued to farm on occasion). Others continued to farm in the more productive lands while also doing some hunting. According to [Wiki,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_Indians) the first group included the Blackfoot, Arapaho, Assiniboine, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Gros Ventre, Kiowa, Lakota, Lipan, Plains Apache (or Kiowa Apache), Plains Cree, Plains Ojibwe, Sarsi, Nakoda (Stoney), and Tonkawa, and the second included the Arikara, Hidatsa, Iowa, Kaw (or Kansa), Kitsai, Mandan, Missouria, Omaha, Osage, Otoe, Pawnee, Ponca, Quapaw, Wichita, and the Santee Dakota, Yanktonai and Yankton Dakota. Of course the popular image of Plains Indians is of the nomadic hunters, but they actually included a range of subsistence strategies. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/56 "2013-12-14T19:33:37Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > There’s actually no evidence of the Clovis people pushing the North American megafauna into extinction. There’s maybe a dozen mammoth kill sites in the USA (one has about a dozen very young mammoth, another has two, etc, compared with multiple sites each with hundreds if not thousands of kills in Europe, including those with the bones stacked like cordwood according to type. In some cases, they made homes from the bones However, Clovis peoples may have [hunted mammoths more intensively over a shorter period of time.](http://csfa.tamu.edu/who.php) Saying there’s “no evidence” is misleading and not accurate. > [@](#): > > However, the 14 known unequivocal Clovis proboscidean kill and butchery sites is an unusually high number for such a short period of time, especially in light of the number of kill sites known for the Old World Paleolithic. In most areas of North America, Clovis people hunted mammoth and mastodon regularly, and they likely played some role in their extinction. [QUOTE=DrDeth] _Today, the overkill position is rejected for western Europe but lives on in Australia and North America. The survival of this hypothesis is due almost entirely to Paul Martin, the architect of the first detailed version of it. In North America, archaeologists and paleontologists whose work focuses on the late Pleistocene routinely reject Martin’s position for two prime reasons: there is virtually no evidence that supports it, and there is a remarkably broad set of evidence that strongly suggests that it is wrong. In response, Martin asserts that the overkill model predicts a lack of supporting evidence, thus turning the absence of empirical support into support for his beliefs. We suggest that this feature of the overkill position removes the hypothesis from the realm of science and places it squarely in the realm of faith. One may or may not believe in the overkill position, but one should not confuse it with a scientific hypothesis about the nature of the North American past.”_ [/QUOTE] This quote is misleading. As has been repeatedly pointed out to you, Paul Martin’s overkill (or “blitzkrieg”) hypothesis is only one model for the extinction of the megafauna by overhunting. While Martin’s specific hypothesis, which involves extremely intensive hunting over a relatively short period of time, has been largely discounted, that does _not_ mean that persistent hunting by humans wasn’t the root cause of megafaunal extinction. The extinction of the megafauna of the Americas took place over a comparatively short period of time, affected a wide variety of animals of different ecologies from mammoths to horse to giant ground sloths to glyptodonts, and took place in every climatic zone, from the Arctic to the temperate zones to the subtropics to tropical rainforests. It’s very unlikely that climate change would have had the same effect on all these species in all these different areas almost simultaneously, especially since climate had changed many times before during the Pleistocene without causing any such equivalent extinction. The one new factor the fauna had to deal with was hunting by humans. ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/57 "2013-12-14T19:45:38Z")
The Plains Indians who transitioned into a nomadic type of HG lifestyle are probably not good guides as to how stone age HGs behaved. As they transitioned from agriculturalists to roaming nomads with horses, I doubt they forgot everything they and their people had learned from millenia of practicing agriculture. Stone Age humans who predate settled agricultural communities wouldn’t have the same cultural memory or learned skills as the Plains Indians. I don’t know how much food storage Cro-Magnon era man engaged in or what techniques they used if any, but I don’t see any reason to assume the Plains Indians behaved exactly the same as humans that pre-dated settled agricultural society as a concept. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/58 "2013-12-14T19:59:08Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > Air and sun drying, as well as smoking are a very natural first preservation technique - you dress out something and ride off with a slab of it hanging off your saddle, you end up with a nice sun and wind dried hunk of critter. Or \*under \*your saddle. This may well be apocryphal of course, or the victors poo-pooing the enemy, but I clearly recall my childhood’s history classes teaching us how our Hunnic invaders would keep dried meat there between leather and horse, so that the friction and constant slapping would tenderize it over time without the need for human effort. Any truth to this ? It makes sense to me, in any event - I never had \*bstirma \*but Bündnerfleisch really does have the consistency of a meat brick. It’s also really, really tasty. For optimum decadence (and teeth breakage) cut it into thin slices, possibly using a jackhammer, then wrap them around a cube or stick of old, bone-hard Parmeggiano. You now have the food of the Gods in your hand AND you’re all set to reach Mongolia on foot, dig until you reach Balrog or code through the whole week without leaving your desk :p. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/59 "2013-12-14T20:23:02Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > The Plains Indians who transitioned into a nomadic type of HG lifestyle are probably not good guides as to how stone age HGs behaved. As they transitioned from agriculturalists to roaming nomads with horses, I doubt they forgot everything they and their people had learned from millenia of practicing agriculture. Stone Age humans who predate settled agricultural communities wouldn’t have the same cultural memory or learned skills as the Plains Indians. > > I don’t know how much food storage Cro-Magnon era man engaged in or what techniques they used if any, but I don’t see any reason to assume the Plains Indians behaved exactly the same as humans that pre-dated settled agricultural society as a concept. True. I brought the Plains Indians into the discussion mainly to counter the assertion that hunter gatherers don’t store food. Because of the horse, the Plains Indians were far more mobile, could carry more supplies, and could use hunting techniques that were not available to Paleo-Indians. And of course, with regard to the OP, they rarely if ever hunted mammoths.😉 As I mentioned in post #50, evidence suggests that Paleo-Indians and Clovis peoples cached food for the winter by freezing it, rather than by drying it as Plains Indians did: > [@](#): > > The study of bison remains in Folsom, Agate Basin, and Hell Gap components points unequivocally to winter kills. Fortunately, there are adequate samples of young animals and, in addition, fetal material to help establish animal ages at the time of death. It is suggested that the animals were first butchered and then frozen. The units were piled and used as needed. Obviously, the meat piles required protection; evidence suggests that the hunters may have camped alongside the meat piles, withdrawing food as needed. > [@](#): > > The Colby site in the Big Horn Basin of north central Wyoming (Prison, 1976, 1978) provides evidence suggesting meat caching during Clovis times. … One bone pile (Prison, 1976) in the center consists of an articulated left front quarter of a nearly mature mammoth. Stacked around this are long bones and other skeletal elements of at least two juvenile mammoths; directly on top of the pile is the skull of a young mammoth. … This stacked pile of bones is thought to be a frozen meat cache. If so, it is one that was never opened. The front quarter of a mammoth, weighing several hundred pounds, was placed on a small rise in the arroyo bottom. The other large bones and the skull formed a protective fence around it (Prison, 1978:95-102). The meat evidently spoiled as warm weather arrived. … > > A short distance (30m) up the arroyo is another pile of mammoth bones containing parts of at least three more animals with one skull included. However, this pile was disturbed and no articulated units were present (Prison, 1978:95). The interpretation here is that this also represented a meat cache but one that had been opened and the meat products retrieved. The concept of frozen meat caches appears to fit the data here better than other explanations. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110/60 "2013-12-14T21:00:53Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > I don’t know how much food storage Cro-Magnon era man engaged in or what techniques they used if any, The well-known[Mezhirich](http://archaeology.about.com/od/mterms/g/mezhirich.htm) site in Ukraine, with its famous huts made out of mammoth bones, was inhabited by Cro-Magnons who may have stored meat supplies for the winter in pits at the site. > [@](#): > > About 10 large pits, with diameters between 2-3 m (6.5-10 ft) and depths between .7-1.1 m (2.3-3.6 ft) were found surrounding the mammoth bone structures at Mezhirich, filled with bone and ash, and are believed to have been used as either meat storage facilities, refuse pits, or both. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-hunt-mammoth/676110.md?page=4)