Interesting find. I’d like to see photos instead of a 3d model.
I’m skeptical of their hunting theory. A deer will feed a lot of people. My dad kept our freezer fully stocked with venison. There’s a lot of good meat on a butchered deer, especially if the bones are cooked to make soup. I’ve read that hunter gathers were ingenious in using every part of an animal. Nothing went to waste. Killing an entire herd in an elaborate trap would depopulate a valuable food source.
Perhaps this was a wall for protection from invaders?
A lot more research is needed. 21m is less than 70ft and should be easily accessible to divers.
And yet we did it. There’s a place out West called “Head smashed in buffalo jump”. Because the locals used to drive whole herds off of the cliff there, to hunt them.
And of course, we’re the reason why there aren’t any megafauna left in North America. We did, in fact, depopulate the valuable food sources.
There were megafaunal assemblages that rival today’s African savanna (or let’s be more generous, pre-industrial African savanna) in diversity, size of individuals, and numbers making up herds all over the world. In Europe, in Asia, in the Americas. Even in Australia.
Arguably, part of the reason that there were so many buffalo is that human hunting wiped out the rest of North America’s megafauna.
Massive herds of nothing but bison roaming across the plains isn’t the natural state of things; it’s the tragic fate that befell the Mammoth Steppe once mammoths, camels, and horses (not the mention the weird animals that came from South America, like giant sloths and armadillos) were all eaten.
Imagine if the only large herbivore left in the Serengeti was the zebra, but there was a metric shitload of zebras.
The buffalo became few because the European settlers tried deliberately to wipe them out, because they knew the Native Americans were dependent on them. It was the equivalent of salting one’s enemies’ fields.
It’s very likely that humans accidentally wiped out megafauna species. But that’s not what happened to the buffalo; despite hunting techniques including running them off cliffs.
Now imagine we had no writing from any culture that had encountered the Serengeti pre-Zebrafication. We might be inclined to look at the massive swarms of zebras and say “Wow, isn’t nature incredible?”, not realizing we were merely seeing a shadow of the region’s former diversity.
Humans applied those sorts of mass slaughter techniques everywhere we went.
In Australia, for example, we burned massive swathes of forest in order to flush out prey and foster the development of grasslands. It was easier to hunt in grasslands, and our favored prey preffered them.
So humans put the mammoths, camels, bison, horses, etc all under the same sorts of pressure. Bison were lucky enough in that their reproductive strategies and habitat preferences lined up with the new reality humans were creating well enough to survive (and thrive, once humans slaughtered all of the competition).
I think that greatly overstates how important conscious efforts to wipe out the buffalo were compared to stuff like hunting for furs and tongues as mentioned by @crowmanyclouds. And perhaps even more importantly than direct killing by American settlers, the fragmentation of buffalo range by railroads and cattle ranches.
A pile of American bison skulls in the mid-1870s. Photo: Wikipedia
which has this under the photo,
1892: bison skulls await industrial processing at Michigan Carbon Works in Rogueville (a suburb of Detroit).
(I have assume that the skull were separated out to harvest the horn covers. Which, at the time was used for things that are, these days, made from plastics. If you ever wonder about the origins of ‘horn-rimmed glasses’ that’s what it’s from.)
But before that we hunted the megafauna there to extinction too. Presumably at some point the aborigines realised they could not go on as they were, so took up the managed landscape techniques you describe. As did the North American amerinds, as I understand it. I don’t think the bison were under any risk of such depredation from them.
Where does it say this was for killing entire herds? What it was for was making a predictable route for the deer, that made hunting them easier. But there’s no restricted bunching-up killzone indicated (yet).
You think Paleolithic hunters had a concept of sustainability?
A <1m tall “wall” isn’t going to protect against people. And how did these people man a wall that long? Do you know what population densities were like in Paleolithic Germany? And who were they protecting against, the Lake Monsters?
No one knows the purpose of the wall yet. It will require further research. Hopefully evidence still exists that’s buried in the sand.
I thought the archeologists were describing a tall wall that created a boxed in area where the deer were trapped. I may have misunderstood. Right now they’re just speculating about its purpose. They don’t know how high the wall was originally. Deer can jump fences. Organic materials like wood in a wall would have rotted and been swept away by the ocean.
I think they may well have had. They weren’t stupid. They knew that, in order for there to be meat animals for them to hunt, young ones needed to continue to be born; just as they knew that humans die and so if there are to be humans in the future new ones need to be born.
I also strongly suspect that they needed to learn, in each new place, what hunting behavior was sustainable there. Weren’t the megafauna extinctions generally during the period relatively shortly after humans showed up? And, in the continent on which we evolved along with the other fauna, they didn’t happen – because we learned how to live there as we learned how to be human; starting from being creatures who weren’t capable of exterminating large animals.
The existence of game traps, or of hunting techniques involving driving animals off cliffs, doesn’t mean no understanding of sustainability; limited seasons of hunting may have existed, and only portions of herds may have been so driven; once there was as much meat as could be processed (or more) additional animals were probably left alone. A small group with everybody working can process quite a lot of meat to dry before it rots.
I think they’re considering this to be a game trap because it looks like other examples that are known to be/have been game traps. But I agree that further research is needed. I don’t know whether bones would still be there – lots of creatures, above ground and under water, eat them.
from invaders?
