Guest Post by David Middleton
From The Seattle Times
SEATTLE (AP) – It’s not unusual for an archaeologist to get stuck in the past, but Carl Gustafson may be the only one consumed by events on the Olympic Peninsula in 1977.
That summer, while sifting through earth in Sequim, the young Gustafson uncovered something extraordinary _ a mastodon bone with a shaft jammed in it. This appeared to be a weapon that had been thrust into the beast’s ribs, a sign that humans had been around and hunting far earlier than anyone suspected.
Unfortunately for Gustafson, few scientists agreed. He was challenging orthodoxy with less-than-perfect evidence. For almost 35 years, his find was ridiculed or ignored, the site dismissed as curious but not significant. But earlier this month, a team that re-examined his discovery using new technology concluded in the prestigious journal Science that Gustafson had been right all along.
The pierced bone was clear evidence that human beings were hunting large mammals in North America 13,800 years ago _ about 800 years before the so-called Clovis people were thought to have migrated across the Bering land bridge from Asia.
The announcement came as sweet vindication for the now-retired Washington State University professor.
“I was pretty bitter about the whole thing for a long time,” Gustafson, 75, recalled last week. “I don’t like saying it. I never really admitted it except to my wife. It was so frustrating. But I’m very humbled and happy it turned out this way.”
20 October 2011
Old American theory is ‘speared’
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
An ancient bone with a projectile point lodged within it appears to up-end – once and for all – a long-held idea of how the Americas were first populated.
The rib, from a tusked beast known as a mastodon, has been dated precisely to 13,800 years ago.
This places it before the so-called Clovis hunters, who many academics had argued were the North American continent’s original inhabitants.
News of the dating results is reported in Science magazine.
In truth, the “Clovis first” model, which holds to the idea that America’s original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.
A succession of archaeological finds right across the United States and northern Mexico have indicated there was human activity much earlier than this – perhaps as early as 15-16,000 years ago.
The mastodon rib, however, really leaves the once cherished model with nowhere to go.
[…]
The timing of humanity’s presence in North America is important because it plays into the debate over why so many great beasts from the end of the last Ice Age in that quarter of the globe went extinct.
Not just mastodons, but woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, camels, and teratorns (predatory birds with a nearly four-metre wingspan) – all disappeared in short order a little over 12,700 years ago.
A rapidly changing climate in North America is assumed to have played a key role – as is the sophisticated stone-tool weaponry used by the Clovis hunters. But the fact that there are also humans with effective bone and antler killing technologies present in North America deeper in time suggests the hunting pressure on these animals may have been even greater than previously thought.
“Humans clearly had a role in these extinctions and by the time the Clovis technology turns up at 13,000 years ago – that’s the end. They finished them off,” said Prof Waters.
“You know, the Clovis-first model has been dying for some time,” he finished. “But there’s nothing harder to change than a paradigm, than long-standing thinking. When Clovis-First was first proposed, it was a very elegant model but it’s time to move on, and most of the archaeological community is doing just that.”
First things first… This “discovery” does not alter the fact that the original human inhabitants of the Americas most likely migrated into North America from Siberia across the Bering land bridge. It remains the only viable pathway. Pushing their migration back in time a few thousand years into the Pleistocene just means that the first wave arrived before the Bølling /Allerød interstadials during the Oldest Dryas instead of during the Younger Dryas.
The Real Clear Science link to this article was titled, “First Americans Not From Siberian Land-Bridge.” The BBC reporter seemed to draw a similar erroneous conclusion… “In truth, the ‘Clovis first’ model, which holds to the idea that America’s original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.” The paper in Science is behind a pay-wall; but the abstract doesn’t seem to cast any doubt on the Bering land bridge theory. The significance of this discovery is that the Anthropocene may have begun much earlier than previously thought… At least several thousand years before mankind discovered capitalism…
Science 21 October 2011:
Vol. 334 no. 6054 pp. 351-353
DOI: 10.1126/science.1207663
•Report
Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington
Michael R. Waters1,*, Thomas W. Stafford Jr.2,5, H. Gregory McDonald3, Carl Gustafson4, Morten Rasmussen5, Enrico Cappellini5, Jesper V. Olsen6, Damian Szklarczyk6, Lars Juhl Jensen6, M. Thomas P. Gilbert5, Eske Willerslev5
Abstract
The tip of a projectile point made of mastodon bone is embedded in a rib of a single disarticulated mastodon at the Manis site in the state of Washington. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis show that the rib is associated with the other remains and dates to 13,800 years ago. Thus, osseous projectile points, common to the Beringian Upper Paleolithic and Clovis, were made and used during pre-Clovis times in North America. The Manis site, combined with evidence of mammoth hunting at sites in Wisconsin, provides evidence that people were hunting proboscideans at least two millennia before Clovis.
A previous post of mine, Run Away!!! The Anthropocene is Coming!!!, drew some criticism about my assertion “that modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction.” My comment was at least somewhat sarcastic… And yes, I do know that the human migration out of Africa began long before the Holocene, but, it is a simple fact that mastodons, stegodons and mammoths had “weathered” all of the prior Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles just fine. The only major distinction between the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene and the previous glacial-interglacial transitions was the migration of humans out of Africa, across the world and the demise of most of the mega fauna that were in the path of that migration…
While I may profusely ridicule the notion that mankind’s industrial activities over the last 200 years have given rise to a unit of geological time, distinct from the Holocene… I fully believe that mankind’s conquest of Earth since the late Pleistocene is the only thing that truly distinguishes the Holocene from previous Quaternary interglacials.
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Much of the stuff involving long-ago people passes through a filter of our modern prejudices, and in the end makes me laugh. The actual science is scanty at best. Over that we put wonderful conjecture, which is not science, but more like social science.
I have a distrust towards some of the conclusions people leap to, using DNA. We have only just begun to understand that science, and in its current form it is pretty crude. For example, consider the following:
With each generation, you double the number of forefathers you have. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and so forth. Assuming people marry young, you can fit 5 generations in a century. Go back to the year 1600, and you have 20 generations. Do the math.
Every living person has 1,042,176 Great x 17 grandparents. Rather than getting back to Adam and Eve, you get back to a point where the entire population of earth was hard at work creating only one of you. You can get pretty vain, if you think about it.
Twenty generations ago, just one of my 1,042,176 Great x 17 grandparents was a sailor who twice visited the isolated island of Gfryxt. The first time he was young, and subject to moral failures when he’d been at sea for months and saw a woman, and the second time he was captain of a ship hit hard by scurvy, and needed a crew. The first time the island had a large population, but the second time it had only a few survivors, as it had been ravaged by introduced tonsillitis. Without knowing it, one deck-hand he picked up was his own son, who later settled down and wound up owning an Inn in Cornwall.
Now, according to my Great x 17 grandfather, the people of Gfryxt had unique DNA, because they were so isolated. They had purple skin, red eyes, green hair, were seven feet tall, and had seven fingers on each hand. What? You think that is just a sailor’s yarn? Well, check out my DNA.
What? You cannot tell if I am part Gfryxtian? Your test isn’t sensitive enough to measure if a person is one 1,042,176th of a certain race? Well! If you can’t even go back to the year 1600, what use are you?
This gets better and more interesting. To Say That Altai X came with Asians via the Bering straight tunnel is a bit like Trenberths missing heat. Not a trace in Siberia, Alaska or western states and then reappears like magic on the East and central USA No trail.
But the owners of Haplogroup X in the Eastern USA use the same technology as the French Halogroup X owners i would suggest that is not co-incidence.
I would suggest that this is the oldest, it migrated west, occupied Southern France and Then used Ice to get to USA. Those that remained mutated to more European style X. I cannot prove that but it does make more sense to me. Dont forget that both Asian And European have the same roots.
Ainu is Caucasoid and reflects an eastern migration of developing caucasian genes.
Pity we cannot spend more money on this and research the question, the data and some of the potential interesting sources rather than on Globull warming and Ice Cracks,
Sounds like Dave and i could put together a project any funders?
GL, that would be fun… But I already don’t have enough “hobby time” for Quaternary geology, ice cores, plant stomata and marine geochemistry… 😉
****
David Middleton says:
November 3, 2011 at 9:56 am
beng says:
November 3, 2011 at 8:52 am
[…]
And there’s quite a bit of geologic evidence for an impact, too:
http://craterhunter.wordpress.com/notes-on-ignimbrite-emplacement/part-two/
That blog is 100% science fiction.
*****
If you click on the many links on that site (some lead to several other researchers’ evidence), there’s far more evidence than just in Mexico. Minnesota, adjacent Canada & New Mexico just for example.
The Altaians are in Siberia. Their X haplotype is closer to the Amerindian than the European haplotype is. The Altaians have the same five haplotypes “the Ojibwa, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth, the Sioux, and the Yakima, as well as the Na Dene–speaking Navajo” – No other group is such a close match. The Atlaian haplotype plots in an intermediate position between Amerindians and Europeans.
The only pre-Clovis human DNA identified in North America was found in Oregon and contains the A-D haplotypes; but lacks the X.
Haplotype X is restricted to northern Amerindian groups; not eastern. I was mistaken earlier when I said it was concentrated in the southwest… I forgot that the Navajo didn’t start out in Arizona & New Mexico. The highest Amerindian X concentration is in the Ojibwa (the Chippewa) who were first encountered by Europeans (French missionaries) near Lake Superior ca. 1640.
The Clovis and Solutrean blades share a lot of similarities; but they are not identical.
The Solutrean culture (including their blades, spear points, sewing kits & tools) pretty well vanished from the European fossil record ~15 kya. The Clovis blade is not present in the North American fossil record prior to ~13.5 kya. The pre-Clovis blade that killed the mastodon, thus spearing the Clovis first theory, was neither Clovis nor Solutrean.
Ultimately we all have the same roots.
I can’t disprove a Solutrean migration along sea ice from France to the Grand Banks and then into Nova Scotia. The DNA patterns don’t exclude that possibility. Of course I can’t disprove a migration via Egyptian parasails or Atlantean motor yachts either… /sarc 😉
Although, I can disprove Crater Hunter’s “Mexican Impact Zone” and “radial curtain of pristine pyroclastic materials.”
I don’t think so…
The Mexico bit isn’t evidence of anything other than Crater Hunter’s total ignorance of geology. I don’t have time to dig up geologic maps for every Google Earth image on his blog, upon which he has scribbled “ejecta curtain,” labled arroyos as “V-shaped excavations” and circled up round features that he thinks are astroblemes.
Here’s a real astrobleme… Barringer Meteorite Crater
Here’s a possible astrobleme… Upheaval Dome
Mr. Middleton, thanks for your post and patient responses, what with crop circles, biblical floods, etc. I’d like to back you up a little:
Scientists have debated for decades the causes of megafauna extinction, divided between the climate and hunter camps, just as here. The fact remains that the big animals survived all climate reversals for millions of years, but within a speck of geological time after human arrival, they disappeared. If climate were the problem, we would expect their extinction to begin in the north and move southward. If hunters were the problem we would expect the reverse. And of course the latter is the case, with the latest surviving herds being in far northern islands! These also were finally killed off by hunters, as the landscape continued to warm. The climate argument has always been nonsense.
It took the Mauri (Polynesians) a very short time to wipe out the elephant birds of New Zealand a thousand years ago. Easy pickings, just like mammoths, giant camels, etc.
Disease? That’s a good one–a virus which favor only the biggest animals.
MtDNA constitutes a tiny fraction of total DNA, and people of different races can have identical MtDNA. Tracing MtDNA can be helpful, but is of limited value. Polynesians are seen to have mated with women from New Guinea before colonizing the Pacific. Australians in Tierra del Fuego? Hardly, but the Amazonians look much more like Philipinos than Athabascans. Polynesian colonization of the Pacific is relatively recent, and they must have discovered the big continents more easily than Easter Island and Hawaii, but that also would have been relatively recent. But who knows how much earlier their ancestral seafarers might have fortuitously made a direct crossing, thousands of years earlier? Or should we suppose Phillipino types followed the coast before Mongolian types?
By the way, this ground was covered a few months ago at WUWT in the context of meteoric catastrophe–about as likely as climate change. –AGF
@A G Foster,
My assertion that the megafauna were hunted into extinction is partially “tongue-in-cheek.” Clearly, they weren’t literally hunted into extinction. Habitat shrinkage and disease were probably also factors. And climate change did play a role. Climate change brought humans into the Americas and the addition of human predators may have been the “tipping point” (Argh! I said tipping point)… The previous Pleistocene glacial cycles may have stressed the megafauna; but they were unable to handle that stress during the transition to the Holocene because of man’s entry into the Americas.
To me the DNA evidence is pretty compelling – However, I freely admit to being fairly ignorant in the area of genetics… But the paleogeography and paleoclimatology of the Late Pleistocene are the most compelling evidence (IMO)… I think the Beringia entry is the only one that makes sense between the LGM and the Holocene.
The climatic conditions that coincided with the apparent colonization of the New World were hardly unprecedented. What was novel was the existence of technology that allowed humans to take advantage of those conditions. Aleut technology would easily allow Eskimos to colonize North America under the current climate, but that technology is fairly modern. There was evidently nothing like it during the last interstadial. It seems at least that the earliest Americans were better at adapting to cold than at crossing open seas. Unless of course, Philipino types got here first.
On a clear day you can see across the Bering Strait, but reeds are nowhere and logs are in short supply. It helps to know how to make a kayak out of walrus hide. A dugout canoe is as good as a land bridge. So should we look to the climate or to the early distribution of canoes to predict the colonization of America? In other words, was it easier to sail or paddle to Japan or to Alaska?
I still say the climate had nothing to do with the Pleistocene extinctions, even indirectly.
–AGF
I try not to get caught up too far into the details and get dragged into which way did they go and how, in some vain attempt at “Me first! They first!”…etc.
For a very simple reason:
1a. Dead evidence like dead men tell no tales.
1b. Trying to draw conclusions beyond the evidence requires crossed fingers behind ones back.
Anyone who tries to say they have the definitive answer as to where A and B were and whether or not they got to C and D and how, and then tries to tell others they are wrong is simply setting themselves up on a very shaky pedestal.
Until the “dead evidence” comes to life, hops up onto two feet and speaks modern day English to Mr. Watts and says, “Beer started 35,000 years ago on the island of Niue”, all you have is your old copy of Jurassic Park to entertain yourself with.
We do know the following on the basis of the evidence alone:
1. Just about every distinguishable racial/ethnic/whathaveyou group DNA-wise that exists today has been elsewhere in the world way back when.
2. Humans have been around longer than we used to think.
3. There were rather large civilizations way back when – how large and how far they extended, traveled and traded is still “foggy”.
4. People way back when did have ways of getting around – and you can’t rule out long distance ocean craft as a method.
5. Then something big happened – and timescale-wise – it was quick too. Civilizations were isolated – many falling apart, and people, animals and vegetation died big time.
#5 is what really gets me. Anytime I entertain that thought-wise – I know just right away it will likely happen again. Whether it be a sudden onset of an ice age, or an EU advocate mistakenly activates the Sun’s dimmer, or the Bugs throw an asteroid our way – the result is the same.
Those who initially survive aren’t going to like their prospects. The suicide rate will increase 1000 fold.
It’s at that point in thought I pick up another bicycle wheel and get started with finishing its build cause I’d rather focus on something else.
Quit arguing arguing about what really happened people, leave that to Michael Rivero. You’ve got more important things to do…
=8-)
The two recent WUWT “Little Bubbles” articles suggest that ice-core climate reconstructions need to be taken with a few grains of ‘air.’ Also, given the long period of prehistory, I think that it is hard to say with certainty that any recent non-durable device of simple hand construction or its equivalent has never been used before.
Just for Reference:
Haplogroup X (mtDNA)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [with maps]
“In human mitochondrial genetics, Haplogroup X is a human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup. It has a widespread global distribution but no major regions of distinct localization.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_X_(mtDNA)
Altaic languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [with maps]
“Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. …”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages
Altay people
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“The Altay or Altai are an ethnic group of Turkic people living in the Siberian Altai Republic and Altai Krai and surrounding areas of Tuva and Mongolia.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altay_people
Couple of comments: Robert Ardrey in “The Hunting Hypothesis” speculated that American fauna had no experience with humans and thus had not evolved what he called “flight distance”. In other words, it was easier to get close. So using Africa as an analog may not be accurate.
There are only so many ways to chip flint or other stone. So it’s possible, ref Solutrean and Clovis, that it’s an accident.
See Geoffrey Ashe “Land to The West” He investigates various pre-Columbian traditions as to their possible reference to trans-Atlantic travel. For example,he says the story of Brendan the Navigator, if purged of its religious elements, is a description of the northern sailing route to North America. Ashe speculates that the story writer took Brendan and his quest and inserted it into existing sailing directions, or vice versa. So the sailing was not noteworthy and, indeed, according to the story, every place Brendan went he found people like him already there, offering a place to eat, sleep, and hear Mass. This was considerably later than the travels discussed above but might be one answer to the existence of European DNA, unless analysis demonstrates it’s more than, say, five thousand years in North America.
Linguistic evidence ought to be taken into account. Tocharian A and B are scripts of a type of Indo-European language spokens in central Asia thousands of years ago. This constitutes more compelling evidence than MtDNA for early Caucasian migration westward, but it would be later than the MtDNA evidence suggests–after the dispersion of Proto-IndoEuropean, probably around 6000 years ago.
But yeah, I’ll concede that climate might have affected the timing of American occupation–in the way that it might have hurried the rise of the Isthmus of Panama. But navigating humans were moving northward and would not have waited forever to cross over water to visible land.
–AGF
Of course, it would be interesting if anyone ever found Pre-Viking evidence of domesticated European cereal crops being cultivated anywhere in the Americas.
Dave, sorry about the late reply. I said Caucasoid not Caucasian a big difference. Ethnic groups are not so cut and dried as haplogroups. Also dont forget that Asian and European had common roots and thus each line must have subtle variations between them. Ainu being One. Reading your links, it does highlight the explosive nature of the research.
As a matter of record I believe Bryan Sykes in his book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, mentioned the Ainu Caucasoid features.
It is an evolving science, one that is giving us huge insights into real human history and migrations.
Language has been mentioned above. I dont place much store in that. One simple example, the Finns, Europeans, Speak An Asiatic language. Human migration was not linear, it was more rolling thunder. One step forward, stop and be replaced by those behind. This is very clear in South East Asia with its ancient left behind populations.
The evidence for a cosmic event ending the large mammals in the USA is very strong. I would suggest that the KT event that ended the dinosaurs was a massive event in a small area, hence the distribution of say micro diamonds but the Dryas event was possibly the same energy but spread over a much larger area, thus no micro diamonds.
Referring to some posters, I agree appearances can be puzzling, the classic North American Indian does not look at all Chinese or North Asian.
re: David Middleton says: November 4, 2011 at 8:33 am
You may well be right on both of these points – I was objecting not to the possibility of these things, but to the definitive nature of your assertion when the issue is still up in the air and many discoveries yet await that could affect the overall picture of how we suspect things occurred so long ago. So it’s good to hear you say you had meant it ‘tongue in cheek.’ I see such definitive proclamations in paleo articles all the time, and it drive me crazy. You know, the “this amazing find is the oldest xyz that ever existed” when all that can really be said is “from what we’ve found so far, this appears to be the oldest…”
I still have a really difficult time with all of the proposed megafauna extinction scenarios, especially hunting, primarily because of the other large animals that survived as I’ve mentioned before. I’ve no problem believing, however, that human hunting may have been one contributing cause. :0)
On the DNA evidence… I LOVE genetics, always have, but am probably out of date somewhat wrt the latest on DNA related to populating the Americas. DNA paleo/forensics is still pretty new, especially with trying to date just when various population divisions occurred – so I always take these results with a large grain of salt. mtDNA, of course, is only passed down by the mother – you get your Mom’s mtDNA pretty much intact, while the tale male line of course is traced using the Y chromosome. Currently they believe they can estimate the typical mutation rate for various parts of DNA- haplotypes, mtDNA, Y chromosomes, etc., – and of course they compare the amount of recombination that’s occurred over time for haplotypes and to a much smaller extent the Y chromosome. So a few different methods wind up used to try to back calculate dates based on how many changes have occurred and what percentage of the largest gene pool is present in the population segment being studied.
Ironic timing, but just ran across an MSM article saying that using DNA it looks as if the migration out of Africa may not have occurred through Egypt at all, but through Arabia first. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2057546/Early-humans-Africa-route-Arabia-Egypt.html
And heck, if you want asteroids, well, in 5 days a very large asteroid, approx. 1300 ft. diameter, will pass us closer than the distance of the moon to Earth. YU55, which appears to be a carbon based asteroid no less (the type thought to possibly have seeded the very early Earth), will pass us about 200,000 miles out, and 150,000 miles at closest distance to the moon. Sure would have been nice if we were able to send astronauts to it, or at least an unmanned craft, to actually get some samples!!
@A G Foster,
The Isthmus of Panama dates back to the Plio-Pleistocene transition. Its only role in this particular story is that it might have been one of the primary reasons for the Pleistocene being so much cooler than the Pliocene.
@Grey lensman,
There is no evidence of an asteroidal or meteoritic cause for the Younger Dryas, much less the destruction of the Laurentide ice sheet, as suggested by Crater Hunter.
The Younger Dryas stadial was a wholly unremarkable recovery from a Dansgaard-Oeschger event. Now the D-O event itself, Bølling-Allerød interstadial, was anomalously warm, at least in the North Atlantic. If Solutreans crossed the Atlantic, the Bølling-Allerød interstadial would have been the time to go. The GISP2 temp’s indicate conditions approximation the LIA during the BAI.
@Rational Debate,
I am very liberal in my use of sarcasm (that and my use of profanity are my only liberal traits… And alcohol consumption… Three liberal traits). I often don’t clearly distinguish the sarcastic bits. I probably watched too much Monty Python and read too much Douglas Adams over the last 35 years.
David Middleton says:
November 3, 2011 at 7:57 pm
Haplogroup X is also present in Siberia… http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1226041/
Its trace presence is not evidence of a Transatlantic migration from France to North America 11-24 kya.
______________________________________________
What is surprising about Haplogroup X, is there are “hotspots” in the Druze of Lebanon, the Altaians of Southwestern Siberia, and the Algonquian people in the northeast of North America With Haplogroup X comprising “25% of mtDNA types.[7][8] [Algonquian] It is also present in lesser percentages to the west and south of this area—among the Sioux (15%), the Nuu-Chah-Nulth (11%–13%), the Navajo (7%), and the Yakama (5%).[9] “
The Druze and Altaians are considered “isolated” populations maintaining their native identity and generally not mixing with other groups providing a sample snapshot of the genetic landscape prior to the modern age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_X_%28mtDNA%29
From this I gather the presence of Haplogroup X, indicates the “age” of colonization and the influence of mixing with other populations.
It might indicate that South America and the southwest of North America was occupied first and a later migration carrying Haplogroup X from Siberia was “funneled” towards the northeast as new land opened up. Note the larger percentage of Haplogroup X in the Sioux (Wyoming, N & South Dakota, Nebraska) http://www.crystalinks.com/sioux.html
I recall some evidence in a PBS show, thirty years ago, (IE before certain warm periods were downplayed,) which talked about the “oldest Native American Mound-builders,” and how they were way up in Newfoundland. They were apparently a sea-going people, as there were impressions of long-rotted swordfish bills in their mounds, and swordfish don’t drift ashore, because they sink when they die. What was most interesting was some sort of mini-stonehenges they built. At first the idea was floated that Druids traveled west, but dating of charcoal proved the mini-stonehenges were roughly 500 years older than the Big Stonehenge. Therefore the idea was floated that Indians discovered Europe. I can remember laughing, because when the PBS reporter pressed this idea, (as it makes a great headline,) the archeologist looked alarmed and said, “We can’t conclude that!”
In the last 50,000 years the Earth has lost over 100 genera of large mammals. Over 40 megafaunal species disappeared from North and South America. Many above have questioned whether humans could have caused these extinctions of megafauna. Two excellent science books discuss this issue:
Martin, Paul S. (2005) Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America. Univ. of California Press. Reviewed here:
http://westinstenv.org/histwl/2007/12/01/twilight-of-the-mammoths/
Kay, Charles E., and Randy T. Simmons, eds. (2002) Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature. University of Utah Press. Reviewed here:
http://westinstenv.org/wibio/2008/02/04/wilderness-and-political-ecology-aboriginal-influences-and-the-original-state-of-nature/
The short story is that population dynamics are complex. Ice Age megafaunal populations, like modern herbivores, were not at carrying capacity — the maximum population allowed by food availability. Instead, prey populations are limited by predators, often at 10% or less of carrying capacity. When a new predator (paleo humans) entered the New World (and other previously un-manned ecosystems), the new predatory pressure drove herbivore populations below replacement thresholds, which were already being approached due to existing non-human predator pressure. The decline in prey populations impacted large predator populations, and they died out subsequently.
Humans can switch prey when necessary. We can also survive on vegetable foods — we are the only animal that cooks, turning indigestible items into digestible food. (Cooking, btw, dates back at least 1.6 million years. That’s also about how long humanoids have been burning nature on purpose, i.e. altering carbon cycles.) So when prey populations fall to very low levels, humans eat something else, whereas sabertooth tigers starve to death.
Everyone above is so informed that I hesitate to mention another book: Mr Brouard’s Odyssey, by Diana Winsor, published by Polperro Press in 2004. I’m Diana Winsor, a journalist by trade, and I wrote Mr Brouard’s Odyssey for my father, whose ideas were incorporated in the book. He had been doing research for some 50 years about the origins of homo sapiens, and first wrote a book called Mermaids Ashore, which didn’t find a publisher, so I turned it into a ‘novel’. I wish I hadn’t; of course it wasn’t taken seriously. And he was just a civil servant and mechanical engineer – an amateur (like Mendel, Darwin etc I suppose). However I am always surprised by how many recent discoveries support his theories and indeed his evidence. I put the book away and have been doiing other things, but when my husband sent me this blog I thought I must mentioned my father’s ideas, as incorporated in the novel I wrote for him. He is dead now, but I did win the Spectator essay prize with a piece reminding people of how many such theorists weren’t recognised until after their death. Anyway, you may all be interested, so please to take a look – I think the book is still on Amazon and certainly available from the publisher, Polperro Heritage Press (google for results, and a bit of info about me, although I was just the fiction part of the book, or http://www.billbrouard.com
re: Mike D. says: November 5, 2011 at 10:48 am
Which all sounds reasonable on the face of it, until you start thinking a bit more about things. Why were only some of the large herbivores driven to extinction? e.g., Mammoth, mastodon, etc., but not elephants?
Why the odd distribution also, e.g., horses survived almost everywhere else, but not in America? Camels and elephants also survived elsewhere, but not in the Americas. Cave bears went extinct, but polar & brown bears did not? Sabertooths and dire wolves died out, but lions, tigers, cougars/mountain lions, leopards, wolves, coyote did not (maybe coyote too small to include in the comparison? minor issue).
Then, even if predation drove prey animal replacement levels down, almost always what happens is as a result of prey being scarce, the predator population also beings dropping – litter size, IIRC, even drops before there’s any significant amount of obvious food scarcity. At some point, WAY before any risk of extinction, predator populations decrease as some of them starve, so those are removed from the breeding population… so the predator pop. decreases until there is sufficient prey to sustain the predators and as a result prey availability increases again. Even if you add humans as a new predator into the mix, this cycle should still have occurred – the other prey animals would have just had a more extreme decrease than if there were less competition – but not to the point of extinction.
Particularly when you consider that prey animals switch the species they prey on also. As best I know, its extremely rare (non-existent?) for a carnivore to have only a single or extremely limited number of species it will feed on – particularly if food is scarce. Even if, for arguments sake, predation in the Americas drove mammoth, camels, and horses to extinction, the predators would have had all the other animals for prey also – elk, moose, deer, boar, bison, etc., etc. The more scarce mammoth, camels, and horses were, the less they’d be preyed on and the more the predators would be hunting elk, deer, moose, bison, etc., instead because they’d be far easier to find and far easier to obtain a meal from. Which would have given the mammoth, etc., a chance to recover. The same goes for man’s hunting – they’re not going to go 25 miles on foot to find a mammoth and cart it’s remains back to the tribe, when they can go 1 mile and pick off a ton of bison or deer…
Plus, if predation/prey issues were the cause, then after the major predators went extinct, the fossil record ought to show an utter explosion in the population of the remaining herbivores (elk, bison, deer, etc). Is there any such evidence? I don’t recall ever hearing of anything that way, but could easily not be aware of it if something that way exists.
Then we also have to explain why sabertooth and dire wolves were so affected by postulated prey decrease that they went extinct, but cougars and wolves didn’t….we’ll excuse bears here, because they’re more omnivorous too – but then we’ve still the problem of cave bears vs. other bear species, right?
I use “we” in this because I certainly don’t have an answer or even a pet theory that I think is somehow more sound. It just sure seems to me that the primary theories that we’ve got right now have some really massive holes in them. Even if we contemplate problems in the Americas from an asteroid impact or something, there’s still the problem of why some of these species went extinct while others that are very similar and filled virtually the exact same ecological niches survived just fine.
It’s a puzzle, that’s certain.
Again:
1. When you kill a big animal you feed the whole tribe.
2. The big animals all disappeared.
3. Mammoths survived on the northernmost, most inhospitable islands–until humans arrived there too.
4. Human populations will increase when big prey are easy food–until the prey grow scarse.
5. Humans and dogs arrived suddenly on the New World scene. They did not evolve together with the big game as in Africa.
6. When North and South America were connected, about 5MYA, mass extinction occurred due to the sudden mixing of species.
7. Humans are the most dangerous predators of all, and there is no reason to suppose their appearance would not lead to multiple extinctions. It happened in Australia, New Zealand, in islands all over the world, and it happened in North America.
8. The climate cause is a relic of the “noble savage” revived by modern alarmism. It’s a canard, but still more scientific than meteoric catastrophe.
That’s what I think. –AGF
I’m not going to scroll up and see who mentioned this, but adult elephants have been most definitely been used as a food source by a number of African hunting peoples. Up until living memory. They used powerful bows, and more importantly powerful poisons on their arrows. And did do so for thousands of years.
It wouldn’t have been the safest way to make a living. You certainly couldn’t make many mistakes while learning your trade. But East Africa wasn’t the safest place to try to make a living for several thousand years, so I suppose a little risk taking would have been unavoidable. And people have been making a wide variety of poisons from plant and animal sources for a long, long time. Precisely to mitigate some of the risk of hunting or warfare. Don’t underestimate just how effective their weaponry was, even on an animal as large as an elephant. Very effective as long as you were a good shot, and knew precisely where to put the arrow where it would have done the most good (or most harm, depending on your point of view). I believed they aimed for the liver.