Here’s a (rather brutal, wouldn’t watch if your sensitive to violence against animals) video of African tribesman hunting elephants and hippos with spears. The technique seems to basically be a) bring a lot of guys, b) throw a butt load of spears into the animal, c) harass the animal until it drops.
Dunno how closely that maps onto prehistoric methods, but there doesn’t seem to be anything that would be beyond their reach technologically, anyways.
Fair Point, I’d wondered that too. I’ll take a look.
Hunter Gatherers tend *not *to store food. that’s more of an agriculturalist idea. Storing food requires permanent, inhabited structures to store the food in, which few HG possess. For a HG group, it usually makes more sense to move on and find more food, then to try to store food and then have to sit on it to protect it from scavengers.
If mammoths were like modern elephants, the males never lived with the herd. The females only tolerate the males around when they are breeding.
So if people were hunting the males, that tells us they were hunting isolated individuals that had no herd to defend them. Which makes sense. A bull elephant is no more dangerous than a cow, but a herd of elephant is far more dangerous than an individual.
So, we’re all going on the assumption that Jean Auel’s novel The Mammoth Hunters isn’t the last word?
Mammoths died out long before the bronze age started. The point about the bronze age, and the preceding neolithic (ie ‘new stone age’) is that people were farmers and no longer hunted. In British terms mammoths died out before the mesolithic (‘middle stone age’).
Well, there were dwarf Mammoths on Wrangel Island as recently as 2000 BCE
Brian
But the humans there were still living a stone-aged life.
Say what you will about Ms. Auels’ writing (I happen to be a fan, but YMMV) but my understanding is that she did a BOATLOAD of research into hunter-gatherer society. I have no way of knowing if the mammoth hunts depicted in her novels* are the way it was done in real life but it certainly seems plausible.
*IIRC, in one case the Clan chased a young bull into a blind canyon (using flaming torches to drive it) where it couldn’t turn around, slashed its Achilles tendon so it couldn’t back up, and then just stab-stab-stab.
It’s called a Heffalump Trap. You put honey in the bottom. Detailed instructions here. Remember not to eat the honey yourself, this is where most people go wrong.
Documentary about this very thing: - YouTube
zev, I haven’t read the story you’re working on, but that right there may be what you need. The herd is a factor, but the big lone male is the Moby Dick.
It’s not all desert.
The newish Paleontology Hall at Houston’s Natural History Museum has a skeletal recreation of a mammoth hunt involving cliffs. Including a hapless hunter…
The megafauna die-off, mentioned above, may not have been a result of the Mighty Hunting of the Clovis Folk. And there’s increasing evidence for pre-Clovis immigration. Up at Texas A&M, the Center for the Study of the First Americans has some interesting information…
The “Clovis first” model of the colonization of the Americas has been effectively defunct for some time. Nearly all archaeologist now acknowledge that there were people in the Americas well before Clovis.
zev didn’t say “store food,” he said “stock up for winter.” 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 plus whatever they could hunt locally.
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.
They would also likely cache some in strategic locations, especially if they were living in areas where permafrost afforded them natural refrigeration. Can’t remember for sure, but I seem to recall reading that some evidence of this has been found.
They do have an attitude, however. 
From what I have read and heard, two main technologies played a role:
Spears with detachable foreshafts (harpoons). When it strikes the target, the shaft and the foreshaft separate. The shaft bounces back toward the hunter. The reaction drives the foreshaft deeper into the wound. (Ask a physicist: it’s a neat application of Conservation of Momentum.)
The atlatl enabled hunters to hurl spears farther and faster.
http://waa.basketmakeratlatl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Atlatl-Experiments.pdf
[This is weird. I can cut and paste from his bibliography, but not from the main text. Anyway, scroll down to page 20, and read the section titled “Weapon trials: Problems with experimental evaluations of atlatls”.]
Butler, William B.
1975 The Atlatl: The Physics of Function and Performance. Plains Anthropologist 20
(68): 105-110.
1980 Penetrating Elephant Hides with Wood Atlatl Darts. Plains Anthropologist 25
(90): 353- 356.
Callahan, Errett
1994 A Mammoth Undertaking. Bulletin of Primitive Technology 1(7):23-39.
Frison, George C.
1989 Experimental Use of Clovis Weaponry and Tools on African Elephants.
American Antiquity 54(4): 766-783.
Thankfully. Just a few years ago, The Americas section in the same museum began with a mural of folks crossing the Bering Land Bridge–as if that was the only way to come! I’m wrote a letter to the curator asking for more current information to be posted. He sent me a polite refusal…
The Paleontology hall tells a fuller story, even though it only skirts anthropology.
Any cite for this?
I’d be interested to hear when & where it was used to hunt land animals.