I can see that Paleolithic hunters had some concept of sustainability, but I doubt in the way we see it. It’s hard to accept that they understood extinction of animals but they could understand how over consumption could force them to move or change their hunting practices. This could have been a driving force toward the development of agriculture, but probably more for creating permanent habitats.
On both the east and west coasts of North American mountains of clam, oyster, and mussel shells have been found that were left by Native Americans up to a point in time, and then shells no longer accumulated because they had changed the environment. To some degree that was permanent, particular species of shellfish are have not been found in those areas in the same kind of quantities they once had. In 2014 evidence of a 14,000 year old fish trap was discovered in British Columbia. This is an indication that technology was used to make hunting easier, which may represent an intermediate step between hunting and gathering and the development of agriculture.
This isn’t even a process that is unique to humans.
Nautiloids are an ancient, diverse, and cosmopolitan clade that has been around for almost 500 million years. When pinnipeds evolved about 20 million years ago, they started wiping out the nautiloids wherever they reached. Today, the Nautilus is the only surviving nautiloid, and it only lives in seas with no pinnipeds.
It may well have contributed to routine movement around a known area. Stay put for a while, till all the non-migrating game within easy reach is diminished in numbers, the downed dead firewood has been burned, the plant foods in season have been picked out; then move to the next spot on the seasonal or multi-year route. By the time you come back to the first place, next year or several years later, everything’s recovered and is ready to be harvested again.
Whether that led to the idea that you had to move on before you’d killed or harvested all of a population in the area, leaving some to replenish – that’s hard to tell, but it might have. Are there known ancient oral traditions of, for instance, never harvesting all of a particular plant in a given location?
And whether people extrapolated to migrating herds whose breeding grounds were outside the particular humans’ territory is indeed another question. I don’t know that those were the only species hunted by driving them into traps or over cliffs in groups, though.
I had reason to be reading the Wiki on passenger pigeons a few days ago:
A 2017 study of passenger-pigeon DNA found that the passenger-pigeon population size had been stable for 20,000 years prior to its 19th-century decline and subsequent extinction, while a 2016 study of ancient Native American DNA found that the Native American population went through a period of rapid expansion, increasing 60-fold, starting about 13–16 thousand years ago. If both of these studies are correct, then a great change in the size of the Native American population had no apparent impact on the size of the passenger-pigeon population. This suggests that the net effect of Native American activities on passenger-pigeon population size was neutral.
That can’t be, because passenger pigeon population is bistable: You either have so many that they blot out the Sun, or you have none at all. You can’t have a small number of passenger pigeons. That’s why they died off so quickly.
On another note: How did these ruins come to be underwater? What changed, geologically, in such a short (geologically-speaking) timespan?
I feel like language like ‘step between’ is falling out of favor. Its increadingly clear that populations used a variety of different strategies to sustain themselves, and those strategies varied on cycles as short as a year or over generations. Megalithic building and sustained population centers could and did exist independently of agriculture.
Certainly, strategies to make hunting easier likely existed, but I dont think there’s any reason to think of it as an intermediate thing.
I completely agree with you. Changes like this didn’t happen in steps, that’s just the way I’m used to seeing them described. Survival strategies were in constant transition then as now in order to deal with changes in the world whether we cause them or not. One successful innovation after another had to influence human behavior over time to reach the artificially designated age of agriculture.
a long, winding ridge of stratifiedsand and gravel, examples of which occur in glaciated and formerly glaciated regions of Europe and North America. Eskers are frequently several kilometres long and, because of their uniform shape, look like railwayembankments.[
The description of this megalithic structure doesn’t sound like that – it’s all stones piled together, not admixed with sand and gravel. And it appears to be relatively straight, not winding.
ETA: I live in an area with plenty of eskers, and they don’t look at all like what the article describes.