I just got out of a class on Biogeography about an hour ago, and my professor made a comment that there seems to be pretty solid evidence that there really were “Pre-Clovis People” in the Americas, and that if they did exist, the chances were that they were not hunters. He did say he wasn’t sure that they did exist, as he doesn’t keep up with Anthropology, but his impression was that the evidence was mounting.
Is this really the case? My impression, admittedly based on almost nothing, is that we keep hearing about Pre-Clovis sites, and then they turn out to have been incorrectly dated.
On top of that, does it really make sense that they were non-hunters? Assuming they got to the Americas via migration, doesn’t it make more sense to consume more calorically dense foods, which my impression is meat, particularly for that time frame? If it was more of a “pregnant female on a raft” situation, I suppose being a non-hunting people makes slightly more sense.
Googling “Pre-Clovis” turns up many links. The gist of these seems to be that evidence for humans in the New World more than 11,200 years ago is indeed mounting, if not yet absolutely conclusive.
But the notion that they weren’t hunters is a new one to me. Your prof thinks they were exclusively agriculturalists? What is his evidence?
Monte Verde is widely accepted as a pre-Clovis site. I don’t know about the “not hunters” idea-- that sounds odd. He may be thinking that some anthropoligists postulate pre-Clovis peoples migrated down the coast of Alaska (rather than thru the interior) subsisting mainly on fish.
In terms of evidence, he didn’t really offer any aside from the overkill hypothesis of American megafauna. I guess it seems that Pre-Clovis people must have not been much for hunting, because it’s so very clear (sort of) that it was the Clovis people who drove the megafauna to extinction.
I’m a little confused on the whole thing, obviously.
The most obviposu objection is that the “overkill” hypothesis is just that, an hypothesis. So using it as a basis for another hypothesis produces extremely tenuos conclusions.
The second problem is that the “overkill” hypothesis is somewhat misnamed. While hunting certainly played a role massive environmental changes due to the use of fire and changed species composition was far more important. As a result we could simply conclude that the pre-Clovis people were hunters, but not big on the use of fire or the over-exploitation of specific species.
See, he mentioned that climatic changes are another big hypothesis on why the megafauna went extinct (which was more on topic than the actual Clovis people so much). And he didn’t really say that the overkill hypothesis was why we can conclude that Pre-Clovis people weren’t hunters. He made a side comment to that effect. I’m sure if I ask him about it tomorrow, he’d poke a lot of holes in that idea. But that was the closest thing to “evidence” that was presented.
Really, the whole conversation was an aside to the lecture, which was a focus on Pliestocene climate and land changes, and how that affected species ranges. It just made me wonder.
There are several excavations in South America that are quite a bit older than Clovis, and the evidence is that the earliest inhabitants of one large area lived at first almost exclusively on products of the sea. Gatherers could live with molluscs as the only protein source, not even needing fish. However, they had to have plant food, which might have been seaweed. All I’ve read about this particular culture was in a recent issue of Discover.
(Not Monte Verde, with dates that are reliably at least 38k years old. Even the most adverse archeos who aren’t wearing blinders admit it is more than 20k years old. They’re just fighting a delaying action; the Clovis hypothesis was so pretty - too pretty to let go down without a fight. There are also a number of sites in the US, some of which are now being dated - and some re-dated - in the 20k range. However, it remains that the oldest sites found are in South America, not North or Central, which isn’t very kind to the Bering land bridge hypothesis, at least, not relying on it as the source of the earliest, much less all pre-Columbian inhabitants. The problem may be that the earliest northern sites were inundated when the Ice Age ended and the oceans rose, but nobody knows. {Wonder how much we’ll lose when they rise again? Where will the Bangladeshis and Pacific Islanders go?})
At the particular site under discussion, colonizing groups from the seacoast eventually moved inland and began to harvest products of the land (gatherers), which they traded with the sea-side settlements for their sea life. After still more time, they began to grow things, and the coast-dwellers began to fish. There is a conflict about these sites, reported in a recent issue of Discover magazine - not able to take time to look it up, but it’s only a few months ago.
The conflict is over who should be credited with these discoveries. A US husband & wife team went down originally to help an archeo from a S. American university, who was having funding problems. She had already published the culture, and had evidence as to locations of more sites. After one spell of helping and a visit back home, they went back to the area, using the first archeologist’s information on more sites of the same people. They excavated one of the inland sites, and have published that work - without acknowledging her - as their own discovery. Their mentor is on the Latina’s side of the issue.
Agriculturalists come a long time after gatherers (which came first) and hunter-gatherers. When people first start growing things, they use different methods, and are called horticulturalists (e.g., forest- and jungle-dwellers who use “slash and burn” to make gardens are horticulturalists). The pre-contact Incans and pre-contact Navaho, OTOH, are examples of agriculturalists. They farmed the same areas, year after year, and did a number of other things - including fertilizing and irrigating.
WRT other responses in this thread: I get sooo tired of having my ancestors maligned for “overkill”.
I’ve been to England, but those islands are pretty small to have any surviving megafauna. I really look forward to the day when I can visit Europe and see the mammoths, cave bears, saber tooths, megaceros, and all the other wonderful animals that my dumb ancestors killed off, and the Europeans and Asians didn’t. It will be so exciting and instructive!
Just think! My ancestors only managed to leave a few million bison on the plains by the time white men came, and a few hundred million passenger pigeons everywhere.
There were so few beaver left when Europeans arrived that it only took a century and a half of both natives and whites trapping every one available to export the skins so that Europeans could have hats made at bargain prices from the felt(ed fur) to pretty much kill off the beaver (it’s taken a couple of centuries for the few they missed to proliferate back to the point that it’s possible to find beavers).
The US government had to pay a bounty to hunters to kill off the bison, but the only way the hunters could make the big buck$ needed to support a life of wine, women and … gambling, was to just slaughter them and leave them on the plains to rot. Sad, innit, that they had to go to such lengths to get rid of those pesky critters? The bison escaped extinction by a hair - at one point there were none left in the US, and less than 50 in Canada - out of all those millions which once thundered across the Great Plains.
And the passenger pigeon? It was less than a century ago that white people finally managed to rectify that one of my ancestors’ mistakes and made them extinct. Sloppy, weren’t we? No doubt we should have left more species for the white folks to kill off the way they did those. It was pure thoughtlessness to deprive white men of the pleasure, and really unkind to make them have to go to Africa and Asia for their big game hunts. So why are white men now so angry with Africans and Asians over elephants, chimpanzees, orangutans, rhinoceri, parrots, etc.? Aren’t they just completing the Great Work? Most of it is only being done because there are people with money willing to pay for rare animals, or their skins and other products.
And the stupid North American natives were so enthusiastic about preemptive burn-overs of the forests that the earliest white people said the forests were like parks. No overgrowth until the whites took them over, logged them off and then let the second growth come up, with vines and undergrowth to make it hard to hunt, and easy for pyromaniacs. You just couldn’t get up a decent forest fire in those redman-tended forests, no matter what you did! Imagine! Think of all the excitement they missed, with no forest fires. Of course, on the Plains, they couldn’t figure out how to prevent wildfires after all the annual growth got dry in late summer. Dummies! All they had to do was to plow up the land, and then there’d be no way for fire to spread very far.
/sarcasm
Climate change had a great deal more to do with the death of megafauna everywhere in the world than anything else. The Siberians weren’t overhunting mammoths anymore than the indigenous inhabitants of North America were, but the mammoths died off there just the same. It all happened at the same time, everywhere in the world, 10k years ago, when the Ice Age ended. Is that really so hard to understand? I guess so, or we wouldn’t be facing the oceans drowning more land.
Tygerbryght I’m not quite sure what that rant was in aid of, but it doesn’t belong in GQ.
Addressing the factual issues.
First off nobody disputes that some megafauna survived in most parts of the world. Only the smaller landamasses, Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand for example, had all the megafauna exterminated. But the fact that many millions of individuals a single megafaunal species survived in the Euramerican bison does not change the facts.
One species survived, several dozen other megafaunal species are no more. And that includes at least two endemic American bison species. Only the pre-adapted European bison which migrated to North America with people managed to survive. The endemic species are no more. That in itself is powerful evidence that overkill and not climate change are the primary culprits
The next point is that environmental change is environmental change. Amerindian burning and land management practices did indeed create a parkland type of system. However that in itself was not natural, as evidenced by the rapid changes that occurred when the Indians were removed from the system. Just because a parkland or savanna is prettier or less fire-prone or easier to utilize then a natural forest does not mean that it is any the less unnatural. And the process of creating that parkland has negative consequences for species adapted to closed forest systems.
No, that simply isn’t true.
There is very close to incontrovertible evidence that humans were the primary drivers of megafaunal extinction in Australia. There is incontrovertible evidence that humans were responsible in Indonesia, Micronesia, New Guinea, Madagascar and New Zealand. I don’t know who told you that climate change was the greatest factor everywhere in the world, but they clearly don’t know their stuff.
For the rest of the planet, it is still open to debate as to whether climate change or humans were the primary drivers, but ATM the majority opinion is that humans were the primary drivers, if coupled with climate change.
See, the problem with invoking climate change is that these species had seen innumerable climatic changes far more severe than those that were being seen when they became extinct. The species assemblages survived all those more severe events more or less intact, yet more moderate events caused not simply some extinction, but mass extinctions.
The other problem with invoking climate change is the timing, which I will discuss more below.
That’s right, they weren’t hunting them any more, or any less. Nonetheless mammoths did die out wherever they were hunted. Now we could invoke simultaneous climate change if we wished. The problem is that mammoths survived until historical times on several islands which were never populated by people. That is quite simply impossible to explain by invoking climate change. The fact is that small, inbred island populations should have been far more vulnerable to the effects of changing climate than diverse continental herds with migratory capacities. Yet it was the island herds that were alive when Julius Caesar walked the streets of Rome. But not all island herds, only those herds on unpopulated islands.
Sorry, but the only way to describe that statement is “utter bollocks”.
The widely disparate timings of megafaunal extinctions is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for human involvement. Had all such extinctions occurred at the same time worldwide as you claim the involvement of humans cold be ruled out altogether. Even if all extinctions occurred at the end of ice ages you might be able to make a case.
However what we see is exactly the opposite.
Humans arrived in Australia some 45, 000 ybp, and the megafaunal extinction occurring at around 30, 000ybp. At the time the climate was becoming colder and drier.
Humans arrived in North America around 10, 000 ybp. And the megafaunal extinctions occurred around 8000 ybp. AT the time the climate was getting warmer and wetter.
Humans arrived in Madagascar around 2000ybp. The megafaunal extinctions occurred around 1000ybp. At the time the climate was becoming more variable tending towards extremes of wet and dry.
Humans arrived in New Zealand around 900 YBP. And the megafaunal extinctions occurred around 500 ybp. At the time the climate was becoming colder and wetter.
And so on and so forth for all the other land masses. As you can quite clearly see there is simply no truth in your claim that the megafaunal extinctions all occurred at the same time everywhere in the world. They occurred over a period of at least 30, 000 years.
Nor are the extinctions linked to any particular climatic cycle. Sometimes they occur when the climate is warming, sometimes when it is cooling. Sometimes when it is getting wetter, sometimes when it is getting drier. The only common factor is that it invariably occurred shortly after people arrived. And lest you think that all the extinctions occurred when the climate was changing somehow, you need to realize that the climate is always changing. No matter when an event occurs it is always associated with some sort of climate change. The important point here is that these events don’t coincide with any particular type of climate change.
Blake, would you mind pointing me in the direction of works that talk about the change in species composition due to fire mentioned in your previous post?
Googling suggests (but doesn’t actually prove) that this is wrong. The commonly cited figures are that the low point for total bison population was around 800, with something like 500 in the US.
I’m sure he would be quite surprised, since a Clovis point was found in his hip. Actually, Kennewick Man is post-Clovis (his remains are dated to about 9K years ago) although he appears to be ethnically different from Amerindian populations. This last fact probably makes people think he is pre-Clovis since most people assime Clovis = Amerind.
I really don’t think that small groups of guys armed with lances, atlatls & darts could take down enough mammoths, mastadon, ground sloths, cave bears, et al to lead to the massive megafauna extinctions at the end of the last ice age. No matter which continent we’re talking about. I think that the extinction was due to diseases caried by humans, their dogs or maybe even rats following our ancestors around.
Um, we were talking about pre-clovis humans in the Americas, right?
Since we’re in GQ, and looking for factual answers, there is none when it comes to “what killed the megafauna”. There are competing hypothesis (climate change, human hunting, disease, all of the above), but no generally accepted theory. I’d suggest openning a thread in GD to get a debat going, if that is what is desired, but we’re never going to agree on what the answer is here.
What I meant was that many people think that Kennewick Man belonged to a population of people who migrated to America in pre-Clovis times, but were eventually wiped out by the later Amerind settlers.
According to what I’ve heard, his closest living “relatives” are the Ainu people of Japan.
It’s necessarily going to be a bit dispersed since we are talking about at least 4 continents and 20 islands. It’s also going to be a bit hard to locate a lot of the references since they appear primarily in journal publications.
Having said that, probably the best general interest work on the subject as it applies to Australasia would be “The Future Eater” by T. Flannery. Flannery has done a lot of work on this subject, and his stuff has been repeated ad-nauseum, so a simple Google search on [Flannery fire megafuna] will provide a lot of his stuff in various forms of completeness and bowdlerisation. I highly recommend this book, not just for this specific topic but a general overview of the human history of Australasia. It’s the “Guns, Germ & Steel” of that region, but far more readable with far more cited facts and less opinion and speculation. Flannery has also published a companion book to TFE dealing with the Americas, but I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read it, so I don’t know how much it deals with this subject.
North America lack any similar combined work. The closest are probably various works on North American fire history by Steve Pyne which go into some detail about the use of fire by Indians and their environmental effect as it applies to the plant communities. While the effects on the megafuana is only briefly touched on the implications of such massive changes should be obvious. Another reasonable work by Bonnicksen called “Americas Forests” which deals with the effects of Indian burning on forests. Then we get into the work of Steve Archer of Texas AMU, who’s webpage seems to be down at the moment, dealing with all the evidence of changes induced as a result of the removal of Indian fires. Beyond that the references for the effects of fire-induced change and megafaunal die-off is widley discussed but scattered throughout the literature. Nonethelss those sources should give a good idea of the magnitude of human fire changes in the North American landscape, and you can draw your own conclusion on the inevitable impacts on large animals as a result.
South America is less widely discussed to my knowledge, and the references I’ve seen tended to be primarily in academic journals and not widely availble had I bothered to make a note of them.
Madagascar is somewhat more complex than most other cases because people were already established agriculturalists when they arrived, so the type of environmental change was inherently different. However fire undoubtedly played a major role. I can’t recall any specific references but I do recall that Burney has some solid evidence for the role of fire in the extinctions, so if you do lit. search on that author you should get some results. (I only recall the name because Burney has done similar work in other parts of the world and I was surprised to see him associated with Madagscar.)
Hopefully that’s enough for you to be going on with.
Two problems.
I don’t think anyone proposes that people literally killed and ate all the megafauna. As I have said, human induced ecosystem change was probably the primary factor.
The second problem is that I have never heard a reputable scientist claim that such a feat was actually impossible, even if it was unlikely. So what facts do you base your opinion on? Because we are chasing factual answers here.
Several massive problems.
The first is that the suite of species exterminated was so diverse. I would readily buy a disease killing out one species. Or even one closely allied group of species like “all ungulates”. However that is not what we see. Invariably the extinction affects ungulates/vombatids while at the same time taking out edentates/macropods and ursids/dasyurids along with snakes, tortoises, crocodiles and giant birds. There is simply no known disease that has that sort of scope. A disease or even a suite of diseases might jump species but not to the extent of wiping out such widely disparate clades.
That problem is compounded because the disease is adaptable enough to extinguish giant ducks, giant tortoises and giant sloths and giant vombatids while at exactly the same time it has absolutely no effect on small ducks, small tortoises, small sloths or small wombats. All those small species were largely or completely unaffected or even increased in numbers and range. That makes no sense.
The next problem is the timing once again. North America has been opened up to animal transfers from Asia several times in the last few million years. During that time horses migrated form the Americas to Asia while bison migrated from Asia to America. So we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that mass migrations occurred numerous times. Yet none of those migration events coincided with mass extinctions. Only the last one, the one where man arrived, was followed by mass extinctions. Yes we could postulate novel diseases, but it’s the same problem we have postulating climate change. These species had survived numerous larger changes in the past and never succumbed to novel diseases or climate change. Yet every single time humans arrived there was mass extinction. The same is true of the other landmasses, with the arrival of bats and rodents to Australia, hippos to Madagascar and so forth. Previous migrations has no effects. The last human migration coincidentally also brought disease.
The problem of domestic dogs and rats is quite simple and quite conclusive. Aborigines had no dogs and no rats. Indians may or may not have had dogs, but wolves were already making that migration independent of people, so their dogs couldn’t have had any more luck transferring disease. Quite simply there were no human-associated animals in these two cases, so we can toss that one out the window.
Gee, I said exactly that right up there ^.
However we can still discuss the facts presented. I’m ignoring the opinions given in tygerbryght’s rant and simply correcting the more egregious misreprsentations of the facts. There are not competing hypotheses about whether all these extinctions occurred simultaneously for example. Nor are there competing hypotheses about whether humans were the prime drivers in New Zealand or Madagascar. Those statements of hers were simply totally untrue. There’s no debate.
Do they? I haven’t read that, but it’s possible. Do you have a cite for that claim? I suspect it would be entirely speculative.
That’s one possibility, based (IIRC) on morphological data, not on DNA data. If we eventually get that latter, it might be easier to pin down. I’ve also seen mention of possible connections to Poyneisians (or, more accurately, proto-Polynesians).
It’s easy to slip and use the wrong terminology. I figured you know that, hence the smiley.
