Or did they think if they did the right dance / painted the right cave wall, more deer would come. Just like they did every year.
Oh, no, a megafaunal extinction definitely happened in Africa, around 1.4 Ma. Sabretooth cats, the largest elephant species, hippos, African chalicotheres, larger variants of zebras, warthogs, antelope, giraffes. All at more-or-less the same time (and the same time Homo started really getting into this pointy rock thing) It just wasn’t as complete as elsewhere, and sooner.
Stupid has nothing to do with it. A cite for the beliefs and knowledge of a pre-literary people is obviously impossible, but it seems quite far fetched to me that hunter gatherers somehow just knew this information, but then as soon as they settled down and started writing they degenerated into believing nonsesnse about spontaneous generation and the like.
It seems completely obvious to us modern humans because, like a fish growing up in water, we grew up with the concepts of statistics and population studies as preexisting variables in our background. These concepts were very clearly not obvious to settled peoples writing down their thoughts in ancient Greece or China; obviously we don’t have writings from hunter gatherers, but I doubt they magically knew about it.
The mass extinctions seem to coincide with the first major climate change event after the arrival of humans.
Climate change cycles were causing problems for various animal groups around the world throughout the Pleistocene, but they tended to spring back. Once humans show up, the next swing of the climate pendulum proves fatal.
These extinctions happened quickly from a geologic scale; like, lightning fast. But not at the human scale; here they were glacially slow.
I don’t think pre-literate people relying on oral traditions without knowledge of statistics or population dynamics are going to notice that the mammoths are disappearing over thirty generations.
Hell, look at medieval art. These are people who had a much broader knowledge of the past, they had hard evidence that major things change over time (eg, no more Roman Empire). Yet much of the art from the time depicts biblical scenes with contemporarily dressed and armed people!
If a medieval monk with access to writings and statues from Ancient Rome still thinks that the battle of Jericho had a bunch of knights and crossbowmen in gambesons, you’re really telling me that a Paleolithic hunter can accurately assess the sustainability of different hunting methods based on stories told by his great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather?
One thing I heard about in my anthropology elective way back when: There used to be herds of musk ox all over the Canadian arctic, and their strategy when attacked was to have the big oxen form a circle facing out, with the children on the inside of the circle to protect them. This was a great strategy against things like wolves, because there was no way for them to attack without going up against some musk ox horns.
But it was a terrible strategy against predators who could throw spears and take shots the oxen without taking any personal risk to life or limb themselves, and because their instinct was “stay in formation no matter what”, they would just stand there and be killed. And they would not abandon individual dead animals, the only way the human hunters could get any meat was to kill the entire group – otherwise the remaining animals would attack them.
So anthropologists could track the historical migration of the Dorset or Thule (I forget which one it was) culture up the archipelago by the musk ox bones.
Africa has very diverse megafauna today because it suffered less from climate change thanks to its position on the globe (less does not mean none, of course) and also because many modern species - the modern lion Panthera leo, the African elephant genus Loxodonta, the split of zebras from asses, etc - appear to have evolved right around 1.5-2 million years ago as well.
So these species would have emerged and evolved right alongside sapiens, replacing the biodiversity lost in the extinction @MrDibble mentioned with animals better suited to living alongside humans (many of these species are smaller than their Pliocene predecessors, perhaps as an adaptation for living alongside Homo sapiens.
I find it pretty unlikely that they never made any connection among pregnant deer/fawns/adult deer; or among pregnant women/babies/adult humans.
Was anybody claiming spontaneous generation for human babies, or for domestic animals, or for wild prey animals some of whom were undoubtedly butchered when pregnant and which were seen visibly caring for smaller versions of themselves?
They were claiming spontaneous generation for creatures for whom they couldn’t see the eggs and for which the adults looked nothing like the larval stages; so they didn’t connect a fly landing on the meat with maggots appearing later.
That’s a point. They may well have been thinking ‘there’s bound to be another herd out there somewhere; it won’t matter if we kill all of this one.’
This is one of the tricky things about trying to guess ancient cultures, of course. The same physical info can back quite different guesses about what people are actually thinking. And, of course, like modern ones, ancient cultures would have varied.
Yes, very likely a combination of factors; which is also why we didn’t wipe out many other species – they were less vulnerable to the other factors.
Did they? Or did they depict them in modern-to-them dress because they considered the lessons/stories to apply also to people in their own time? If somebody now stages Romeo and Juliet in modern dress, does that mean that they don’t understand people in Shakespeare’s time didn’t wear jeans?
Most of the population, of course, didn’t have such access, and may well have thought that the battle of Jericho involved people dressed and armed in much later fashions. They were getting their information from the artwork, not from the writings.
The idea that “I see the way me and my partner reproduce, I see the way the dogs reproduce, I see that deer give birth in the spring; therefore I conclude that deer reproduce the same way as dogs and humans and that if I kill all the female deer there will never be deer again” requires several independent logical leaps that while obvious for a modern person raised on the scientific method from birth are not necessarily natural conclusions without that background.
Again, it’s not about stupidity. It’s about knowledge and experience that a pre-literate society has no way to acquire. Einstein would not have invented his theory of relativity if he grew up as a hunter-gatherer. There may well have been millions of hunter-gatherers throughout history whose capacity for intelligence dwarfed Einstein and made him look like a simpleton; without access to information, they would be much more limited in what they could accomplish.
You’re making the assumption that the breeding/calving sites are anywhere they were at. Reindeer can migrate massive distances, and their calving grounds can be quite far from where they spend most of their year. So these hunters may never have seen a pregnant or newborn reindeer, just larger calves and adults.
True. But some of those leaps look large to us because we’re used to thinking that humans are something entirely separate from other animals. Not all cultures appear to think like that.
That’s a point. Baby deer, however, look extremely like baby deer. Female deer have obvious female parts. Why would they not have thought that baby deer were produced the same way baby humans are?
They lived and died according to what those herds did, and according to how they behaved when hunted. They would have had to pay them close attention. It seems unlikely to me that they didn’t think at all about the obvious fact that there were young ones among the herd; though it’s certainly true that some things I’ve thought highly unlikely have turned out to be true.
The barnacle goose story was spread by motivated reasoning. The story made it a vegetable, or at the very least a fish, which made it appropriate eating for fast days.
And if they did think about it, they might conclude rhat the deer herds are sent by the Great Deer Spirit of the Eastern Valley. So if they thank the Great Deer Spirit appropriately when slaughtering their kills, then of course the GDS will send large herds again next year.
The herds the GDS sends contain male, female, young, and old animals. What of it?
And wouldn’t stories about how prey animals were sent by spirits that can be appeased be wonderfully convenient to spread for the shamans who get a cushy gig and plenty of social status by appeasing said spirits?
The degree to which human activity contributed to megafauna extinction seems to be pretty seriously debated within the field; to me, the timing certainly seems indicative, but people that know more than me appear to be less convinced. Among other things, climate change would also shift human population patterns, making causation less clear.
As far as this particular wall, using walls to influence how herds break seems to be a pretty common strategy.
I wouldn’t doubt that early humans knew that prey animals reproduce the same way as humans do. I think the first big “leap” would be to realize that they were capable to hunting them completely to extinction and there weren’t just more herds over the horizon.
Like how anyone can recognize that a campfire produces a lot of smoke, and that smoke makes it hard to breathe if you’re near the campfire, but the idea that there could be so many campfires and so much smoke that it makes all the air hard to breathe would be a foreign concept.
But I think the bigger deal is the prisoners dilemma aspect of the situation. If there are two tribes of hunter-gatherers, one of which hunts until they are satiated, and the other carefully manages hunting to maintain the herd, the former is going to do better than the latter (up until the point when the herd collapses, then they’re both just as screwed). To do effective herd management, you need a government.
When the Lake Monsters send their people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. And some, I assume, are good people. But we’re going to build a wall - a beautiful wall, nobody’s ever seen a wall so beautiful. But only if I’m chief! Sleepy Og won’t build a wall this beautiful!
I remember reading (possibly in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann, but I’m not sure) that passenger pigeons were only so numerous in North America because so many indigenous people had died, which means those birds weren’t being hunted by them.