To get to the other side…
Guest post by David Middleton
“There has long been a controversy about the timing of bison arrival in North America,” said Shapiro. Bison arrival in North America marks the beginning of what geologists call the “Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age,” which is used to discriminate between different ecological periods in the continent’s history. “Until recently, the fossil records from different parts of North America disagreed with each other, with a few fossil localities suggesting that bison arrived millions of years ago, but most old fossil sites showing no evidence of bison at all,” Shapiro said. As new methods to date fossil localities emerged, the ages of the sites in North America with purportedly very old fossil bison have all been questioned, leaving the timing of bison arrival a mystery.
The new study explored fossil locations in Northern North America — the entry point for bison into the continent — and extracted DNA from two of the oldest bison fossils known on the continent. One from Ch’ijee’s Bluff in the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in northern Yukon, and another from Snowmass, Colorado.
“Bison used what is called the Bering Land Bridge — a vast connection of land between Asia and North America — to cross from Asia into North America. The land bridge forms during ice ages, when much of the water on the planet becomes part of growing continental glaciers, making the sea level much lower than it is today,” explained Shapiro. “After they arrived in Alaska, they spread quickly across the continent, taking advantage of the rich grassland resources that were part of the ice age ecosystem.”
While bison were not introduced by humans to North America, their rapid spread and diversification are hallmarks of an invasive species — and part of what make bison’s role in the Great Plains ecosystem so significant. “Bison arrived in North America and quickly came to dominate a grazing ecosystem that was previously reigned over by horses and mammoths for one million years,” said Shapiro.
[…]
So… These guys were actually doing the right thing by trying to wipe out an invasive species…
It’s fascinating how extreme climate changes and intercontinental migrations of invasive species could have routinely happened before humans discovered fire and invented capitalism… Fascinating.
The paper is paywalled; here’s the abstract…
Fossil and genomic evidence constrains the timing of bison arrival in North America
Duane Froesea,1, Mathias Stillerb,c, Peter D. Heintzmanb, Alberto V. Reyesa, Grant D. Zazulad, André E. R. Soaresb, Matthias Meyere, Elizabeth Halld, Britta J. L. Jensena,f, Lee J. Arnoldg, Ross D. E. MacPheeh, and Beth Shapirob,i,1
Author Affiliations
Edited by Donald K. Grayson, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, and approved February 3, 2017 (received for review December 20, 2016)
Significance
The appearance of bison in North America is both ecologically and paleontologically significant. We analyzed mitochondrial DNA from the oldest known North American bison fossils to reveal that bison were present in northern North America by 195–135 thousand y ago, having entered from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge. After their arrival, bison quickly colonized much of the rest of the continent, where they rapidly diversified phenotypically, producing, for example, the giant long-horned morphotype Bison latifrons during the last interglaciation.
Abstract
The arrival of bison in North America marks one of the most successful large-mammal dispersals from Asia within the last million years, yet the timing and nature of this event remain poorly determined. Here, we used a combined paleontological and paleogenomic approach to provide a robust timeline for the entry and subsequent evolution of bison within North America. We characterized two fossil-rich localities in Canada’s Yukon and identified the oldest well-constrained bison fossil in North America, a 130,000-y-old steppe bison, Bison cf. priscus. We extracted and sequenced mitochondrial genomes from both this bison and from the remains of a recently discovered, ∼120,000-y-old giant long-horned bison, Bison latifrons, from Snowmass, Colorado. We analyzed these and 44 other bison mitogenomes with ages that span the Late Pleistocene, and identified two waves of bison dispersal into North America from Asia, the earliest of which occurred ∼195–135 thousand y ago and preceded the morphological diversification of North American bison, and the second of which occurred during the Late Pleistocene, ∼45–21 thousand y ago. This chronological arc establishes that bison first entered North America during the sea level lowstand accompanying marine isotope stage 6, rejecting earlier records of bison in North America. After their invasion, bison rapidly colonized North America during the last interglaciation, spreading from Alaska through continental North America; they have been continuously resident since then.
The Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age is the little sliver at the top of this stratigraphic column. It’s labeled “RLB”…
More than you ever wanted to know about the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age.
Useless Bison Triva
- American buffalo aren’t buffalo. They are bison.
- Buffalo wings aren’t made from buffalo or bison. They actually do taste like chicken.
- The Buffalo Bisons is either a redundant or an oxymoronic name for a minor league baseball team.
- Bison once ranged from Alaska to the U.S. east coast, perhaps even in present day Buffalo NY.
Very interesting. The question then is whether bison actually wiped out the mammoths due their feeding habits. If bison feeding habits caused a change in vegetation then they may have been responsible for the mass extinction.
Competition can be a real game changer in evolution.
They came to try their luck against the Clovis weaponry.
G
Mammoth, horse and bison coexisted until the Holocene. They shared the steppe-tundra and grasslands just as do elephant, zebra and wildebeest on the East African savanna today.
There were other megafauna in the mix as well, to include saiga antelope. Woolly rhinos however didn’t make it out of Siberia to North America, aka Eastern Beringia. Many of the predators, such as the cave lion, were also akin to those of the African plains, while others were different. Like rhinos, cave hyenas also remained in Eurasia.
Holy Bison Batman! Chimp, we posted similar comments 1 minute apart!
The wildebeest and the elephants seem to be coexisting quite well across the African Savanna. Relative population size changes are more probably because wildebeest isn’t very tasty and ivory is in high demand.
The Gangetic Plain of India also once housed a similar congregation of species. The Asian elephant is more closely related to mammoths than their African cousin.
The mammoth steppe extended from Britain to Newfoundland at times of glacial retreat, ie interstadials. North American predators were however more nightmarish even than those of Eurasia, despite lacking the cave hyena.
The cave lion was similar to its Eurasian kin, but the more southerly American lion was bigger and smarter than any other lion, then or now. Two species of sabre-toothed cat shared the continent. Smilodon, the more southerly species, was smaller than the mostly Eurasian Homotherium. Tigers lived in the woodlands and leopards prowled the dark in various habitats.
Although the cave bear was absent (I think), there were two species of short-faced bear, one big horse-sized, besides the still extant grizzly, polar and brown bears. In addition to larger than present wolves, there was the even bigger dire wolf. In this ferocious environment, humans welcomed outcast wolves living off the offal of their camps, if nothing else as an alarm system against leopards stalking the night. Hence, dogs.
Wadya mean Gnu’s aren’t tasty ?
Try eating savannah grass instead.
G
George E
I don’t know about gnus but I can assure everyone that a kudu is delicious. Kudu mnqusho (samp and beans + kudu stew). Best horns too.
Kudu are bovines, belonging to the same subfamily and family as bison, cattle and buffalo.
In Australia – a bison is something you wash your fice in – 🙂
Gloria’s sty, mate.
actually
you meant New Zealand using that vowel set, mate;-)
In Aus its a sink
You’ve got me buffalo’ed.
I’m still trying to figure out how animals migrated over an arctic land bridge..in the middle of an ice age…with no food or water for months
There was ample to abundant food and water. Some migrated in and out of Beringia seasonally, as do caribou today. Others overwintered. Bison are adapted to shovel snow aside to get at grass beneath it.
Beringia was a steppe-tundra, not a barren waste. Even a polar desert can support reindeer and musk oxen. Reindeer and caribou can survive and even thrive on little but lichen on rocks. They’re also almost omnivorous, since they’ll eat mice.
So no mystery how bison and other Eurasian animals managed to enter ice age North America.
Steppe tundra is also known as Mammoth tundra…
Bison eat grass.
Recent sediment cores from the shallow northern Bering Sea shelf confirms ice age vegetation found on unsubmerged regions of Beringia:
https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/handle/11122/4585
Evidence for a glacial refugium in south-central Beringia using modern analogs: a 152.2 kyr palynological record from IODP Expedition 323 sediment
Westbrook, Rachel E.
Latitude
l believe the reason why Alaska/ NE Russia became a haven for wildlife during the ice age was due to the weather at the time. The type of jet stream patterning that was driving cold air down across much of North America. Would have been pushing up warm air into the Arctic across Alaska area from the south to replace it. Which was keeping the climate of that area fairly warm.
Say Chimp.
Apparently the entry to North America was more coastal than land, evidently land blockage by ice sheets.
In any case, it seems they arrived in the West first, and migrated elsewhere.
Apparently NO Clovis points in PNW, so Clovis technology either developed in the east (Yankee ingenuity) or imported from EurAsiFrica.
So how did the western coastal illegal immigrants feed their way to the East, without Clovis points.
Seems like the densest pile of Clovis points is in the central East; Carolinas etc.
And evidently the Native American common gene came from Uzbekistan, and went all the way to Patagonia.
How far back Bonobo and Chimp parted ways ??
G
George,
Common chimps and bonobos appear to have split about two million years ago. But since then, despite the barrier of the Congo River, which separates their ranges, at least two instance of hybridization have occurred.
Two (or maybe more) possible explanations for the geographic distribution of Clovis culture exist. One is that a new wave of immigrants brought the complex with them from Asia after the ice sheets started retreating. That after all was the original explanation for Clovis, ie the “ice-free corridor” hypothesis.
The other is that it was developed in North America, although there is a similar Eurasian blade technology of the right age in Eastern Europe and Asia, ie more recent than the Solutrean of Western Europe. No reason why a similar flint-knapping technique could not have been developed repeatedly during the Late Paleolithic.
The microblade technology used by the earliest Alaskans (Eastern Beringians) was shared from North China right across Eastern Siberia, where the latest study has found it to have originated, as opposed to China.
About the microblade technology – we have collected artifacts and chert tools from N-Africa and they dated to 220ka – in the same places of the axes, etc – there was a myriad of spear tips as well as microblades. These blades had all sorts of shapes and sizes and looked more sophisticated that most “miroblades” published from N-hemisphere late Paleolithic time. Obviously we did not target those small “pieces” for dating but they were always around so called “work-stations” were people must have prepared axes, tips, and other tools from the chert nodules weathered out of the limestones. Hence, I have the feeling this is a very old technology and has been around for a long time but we just have not placed an emphasis on tracking down their first usage. But then, this is not my field of expertise so what do I know. Thanks for all the educational comments Chimp!!
It is most likely that most Clovis points can be found under water. The coastal area must have been much lower than today.
“There was ample to abundant food and water. Some migrated in and out of Beringia seasonally, as do caribou today. Others overwintered.”
So humans just followed the herds.
AnotherQlder
March 15, 2017 at 4:13 am
That’s very interesting. That is a long time ago for such advanced stone-working. Anatomically modern humans might be older than 200,000 years. I’d like to see a write-up of your discoveries.
It can be hard to distinguish microblades from waste chips. The specific form of microblade found in Late Paleolithic NE Asia and NW America is pretty characteristic. Because they sometimes used bone handles, we also know how at least some of them were mounted into knives. Many also can be used as burins.
Robert,
Yes. A lot of Clovis points must be underwater, especially on the Atlantic coast. There is less continental shelf on the Pacific, except under the northern Bering Sea, ie former south central Beringia. The Channel Islands of SoCal and the northern Sea of Cortez are exceptions. The Gulf of CA is remarkably deep in its southern reaches.
When we position drilling rigs and platforms in the shallower waters of the Gulf of Mexico, we have to avoid the margins of submerged river and stream channels to avoid disturbing “archaeological resources.” It’s assumed that Paleoindians lived along the rivers and streams. I suppose that during the next lowstand, future archaeologists will hunt for Clovis points out there… /Sarc
Just look at Google satellite of Alaska Bering area…It’s a shallow sea. So when sea levels fell 130 meters during the ice ages it becomes land… So from Dutch Harbor on Unalaska island right across to Russia would have been dry land during the ice age… I wonder were all the King crabs went?….. 🙂
If so it took them 180 000 years. And in any case bison and mammoth coexisted for a million years or more in Eurasia.
So if bison were relatively recent immigrants to the Americas, their ancestors would conceivably be not naive as human prey, and not as affected as the other large fauna that disappeared with human habitation circa 12000 years ago.
Maybe. But the bison would have arrived in North America while humans were still in Africa…
Yes, modern humans are dated to ~50,000. But here were archaic humans, Neanderthals and Densovans that I would call “human”, and H. erectus I would probably not regard as human.
Modern humans date to about 200,000 years ago, but didn’t leave their native Africa until sometime during the last glaciation, reaching Australia and the Arctic c. 45,000 years ago (maybe earlier in Oz), Eastern Beringia (Alaska and the Yukon) some 24,000 years ago, and the rest of North and South America thereafter, first by the coastal route, the land route being blocked by the Cordilleran and Laurentide continental ice sheets. The LGM Pacific teemed with marine mammals and sea birds.
We have to distinguish Homo sapiens which is ~ 200,000 years old from anatomically modern humans which are ~ 50,000 years old. There were two waves out of Africa. The first one was about 100-75,000 yr BP that mixed with Neanderthals and made it to Levant and perhaps South Asia. The second one about 50,000 yr BP by anatomically modern humans is the one that displaced all other hominins and populated the world.
Javier,
Anatomically modern humans are about 200,000 years old. Their remains from southern and eastern Africa plainly show modern traits. The shifting range boundary between moderns and Neanderthals did fluctuate in the Levant with climate. The first modernish people show up there around 90 Ka, displacing Neanderthals, but were themselves replaced again when the region got colder.
There might have been further small evolutionary physical changes, or simply advancing culture, which enabled a possible advance in mental capacity around 70 to 50 Ka, but at this point that’s conjectural.
Homo Sapiens arrived in the Americas much earlier than 15,000 years ago.
Homo sapiens arrived in Beringia (sites 14-19 on the map below) much earlier than 15,000 years ago, maybe as early as 32,000 years ago.
It’s possible that some humans were south of the ice sheet as early as 22,000 years ago; but the clear evidence of human inhabitants begins around 15-16,000 years ago.
?w=680
The late pleistocene dispersal of modern humans in the americas (Goebel et al 2008)
David M
Nice map. Something not shown is the migration from somewhere in Central Asia to Southern Africa. The San (Bushmen) and the Khoi are from there, acording to blood type evolution. When the Portuguese first contacted them they thought they found a lost race of Chinese.
The ‘Hottentots’ (Ottentotu as that called themselves meaning ‘mixed people’) speak words that are plainly Dravidian, and herded cattle on the southern beaches. The Dutch called them ‘strand lopers’ (beach runners). Their words for Sun, Moon, water and river are Dravidian.
The arrow pointing to Madagascar showing the Indian migration south west didn’t stop there. It is a fascinating topic. There are people in Western France with a high % of Neanderthal genetic material. And where the heck did the Basques come from?
Crispin,
Philologists are famous for spinning preposterous fantasies based upon accidental word similarities. It’s always possible to find such accidents in far-removed languages. The Japanese word for “name” is “na”, yet English and Japanese are not closely related languages.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the Khoi are descended from southern Indian peoples. They do however have more Neanderthal DNA than is typical for Africans. This and other facts of their genetic makeup is due to fairly recent admixture with back-migrants from Eurasia, but markers specifically for the southern Indian subcontinent are absent, unless by intermarriage with 19th century immigrants.
http://theconversation.com/how-the-origin-of-the-khoisan-tells-us-that-race-has-no-place-in-human-ancestry-53594
Dravidians however might well be descended from an early wave of out of Africa immigrants, perhaps that exodus which ended up in Australia.
The Khoi were the taller herders of whom you wrote. They practically no longer exist as a separate group, so diluted is their ancestry. The smaller San have survived more intact because of relative isolation in the Kalahari Desert.
Chimp,
Here’s a new paper on the migration into Australia…
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/australia-was-colonized-by-a-single-group-50000-years-ago/
It’s amazing how quickly humans were able to inhabit entire continents.
Thanks.
Entry to Oz and New Guinea around 50 Ka seems likely to me. I didn’t mention that number because there are still people who think that ancestral Aborigines arrived even earlier, ie 60 to 70 Ka. I’m not among them.
Modern humans had spread to Lake Baikal by 42 Ka and, as noted, the Arctic by 45 Ka (as shown in a recent paper). The peopling of the Americas remains controversial, with a disputed date of 33 Ka for a South American site.
A thousand years is an awful lot of time. I personally walked over 750 km in less than a month. The Romans established an empire in 300 years. Populating a continent in a few centuries doesn’t look like rushing.
You were walking to get somewhere and had your supplies provided by others.
The early settlers were only looking for a good place to live. They walked until they found one and settled in. Then their children or perhaps their grandchildren, due to population pressures took off looking for greener pastures and repeated the process.
Javier,
Yup. Even with stopping to hunt, gather and have babies, people blessed with naive large animals on a virgin continent could have spread across the Americas in less than 100 generations.
I wish people would stop throwing out all these numbers of how old these species are along with mankind. They are nothing but guesses based on their own belief systems. I think the science we have today are taught 90% fiction writing and maybe 10% factual science.
Craig,
They aren’t “guesses.” While the process of estimating the ages of fossils can have fairly wide error bars, the estimates aren’t based on “belief systems.”
Radiometric dating, optically stimulated luminescence, index fossils and stratigraphic correlation are fundamental principles of geochronology. While they aren’t perfect, they usually produce a relatively accurate age estimate.
There’s no “belief” involved. Radiometric dating and optically stimulated luminescence employ basic principles of chemistry and physics. Stratigraphic correlation and index fossils employ the law of superposition (the older rocks are below the younger rocks, unless they have been overturned).
Some archaeological sites can be impossible to accurately age, if they have been heavily disturbed by animals or humans digging things up and reburying them.
Craig,
No one is just throwing numbers out. The figures are based upon scientific measurements. Where precise absolute date range estimates aren’t possible, then relative dates can be inferred from stratigraphy, the underlying principle of geology, and well-dated layers above and below an undisturbed site.
For such recent fossils, more dating methods are available, such as C14, than for older remains.
No “belief system” involved. Just scientific observation and measurement. Stratigraphy and radiometric dating confirm oldest fully modern human fossils:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7027/full/nature03258.html
Only belief required is that radioactive decay occurred at the same rate 196,000 years ago as today, which fact there is no reason to doubt.
Previous record was 160,000 years ago, from the same part of the world.
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/06/11_idaltu.shtml
The Young Earth Creationists have plenty of scientific evidence that they find convincing.
Seaice,
As you know, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever in support of a young earth. All the evidence in the world shows earth to be 4.56 billion years old, not 6021 years at 6 PM on this October 22, as per Bishop Ussher’s biblical chronology.
“I wish people would stop throwing out all these numbers of how old these species are along with mankind. They are nothing but guesses based on their own belief systems. I think the science we have today are taught 90% fiction writing and maybe 10% factual science.”
You cannot expect skeptics here to be CONSISTENT in the application of skepticism or the scientific methods, especially Middleton. he is one the worst when it comes to selective skepticism.
So… Mosh… Are you unduly skeptical of radiometric dating?… The law of superposition and stratigraphy? … What, exactly in my reply, specifically contradicts my skepticism of AGW?
Just so I can understand your logic… Are you suggesting that the fact that I am skeptical of AGW means that I have a logical obligation to be skeptical of all science, including the basic principles of geology and geophysics?
As a member of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG), American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) and Houston Geological Society (HGS), I kind of have to throw a Bullschist flag on that.
Chimp, that is what I believe, but the YEC believe something different, and no amount of pointing them to the evidence seems to make a blind bit of difference. They are still convinced that science is on their side and the rest of us are just too stupid or set in our ways to see.
I reckon you can convince yourself of just about anything, and only see what evidence you want to see. The only remedy is to force yourself to look at all the evidence.
Seaice… Then, why don’t the so-called consensus look at all of the evidence regarding climate change?
@Chimp:
For Cro-Magnon migration was possible from western Europe to America with boats following the southern winter ice border of the down to northern Spain frozen Atlanic. That couldt explain the similar flint-knapping technique
Inhabiting entire continents …..
Yes, we in Oz maintain eternal vigilance regarding the threat of rapid kiwi expansion from Bondi Beach westwards. Already the accent has spread faster than the people. There is talk of a wall, with NZ to pay part of its cost.
“Then, why don’t the so-called consensus look at all of the evidence regarding climate change?”
They do.
In order to get papers published they must demonstrate an understanding of the context of their own research and cite a range of papers that provide a good overview.
If they missed out significant evidence this would be picked up.
If you think this is not the case, can you provide an example of a paper that missed out significant evidence in its introduction, and what that evidence was?
The so-called consensus ignores the fact that most Antarctic ice cores can’t resolve century-scale shifts in atmospheric CO2, while denying and/or attempting to suppress all Holocene CO2 proxies and measurements which can resolve CO2 shifts at century and even decadal scales because they demonstrate that pre-industrial CO2 levels were routinely well above 300 ppmv.
Seaice,
Science is not about belief, but evidence. All the evidence in the universe is against the belief in a young earth, so YE creationists hold their belief on faith alone. They are mistaken in imagining that there is any scientific evidence to support their blind faith. That they can’t be persuaded shows that their belief is not based upon facts.
That earth is 4.56 billion years old has nothing at all to do with faith and everything to do with facts, ie scientific observations. As I noted, the only belief required is that elements decay at the same rate now as ten billion years ago. But even that belief isn’t needed, since every other method of dating the earth and solar system arrive at the same age.
krishna gans
March 14, 2017 at 4:02 pm
The Solutrean hypothesis is discussed elsewhere in these comments. Also, technically, Cro-Magnons were of the older Aurignacian culture, from which Solutrean and other cultures developed. Biologically however, Solutreans were of mainly Cro-Magnon ancestry. But so are lots of Europeans and Middle Easterners today.
The Basque are probably descended from the Paleolithic inhabitants of the Last Glacial Maximum refugium in SW France and northern Spain. Southern Britain, northern France and Germany became uninhabitable during the LGM, except maybe for summer hunting camps. The northern and alpine ice sheets advanced and turned what had been steppe-tundra into mostly polar desert.
Homo sapiens arrived in Beringia (sites 14-19 on the map below) much earlier than 15,000 years ago, maybe as early as 28,000 years ago.
It’s possible that some humans were south of the ice sheet as early as 22,000 years ago; but the clear evidence of human inhabitants begins around 15-16,000 years ago.
?w=680
The late pleistocene dispersal of modern humans in the americas (Goebel et al 2008)
If the fossils were found near the land bridge, what are the odds of those fossils being recent immigrants, with other bison further inland being from earlier migrations?
You’d have to look at the ages of the fossils.
Wow- 13 authors and one editor- must be an “institute” or “centre of excellence”. Sharing the gravy and enhancing the chances of one of the authors to get the next grant for the “group”? Bet they all march together in the “science parade”.
Naw! No mention of Climate Change. Pretty hard to take it seriously if they can’t even scam for funding!
It’s actually very simple. If it happened before 1760, it’s a natural event. If it happened after 1760, it’s man-made global warming.
“…it’s man-made global warming”
…which causes the climate to change, which in turn causes bad weather.
And that’s on top of the bad weather we were already going to get.
It’s a crisis. Let’s adjust some temperature records!
Andrew
Oh Wow!
Bad Andrew is NOT a cynic.
At All.
No.
Not in any way.
Not in any fibre of his being.
NOT a cynic.
Auto.
/SARC. Big Sarc, actually. Did you guess, Mods?
Of course you did . . . . . . .
And thanks again for your work.
We humans are the biggest “invasive species” of all.
A little hubris.
Ants, termites and cockroaches seem to be at least as good as humans. Ants and Termites actually generate more CO2 than human activities too.
In order to become an invasive species ants, termites and cockroaches had to hitch a ride with us humans.
PS: You forgot rats.
And proud of it baby.
The land bridge was pretty big and was a complete ecosystem. It was called Beringia It wasn’t just a migratory route.
Yes it was.
“Yes”, the Bering Sea Land Bridge was probably a migratory route for both land animals and humans …… but …….. it was not the migratory route of the first humans that migrated to North America. To wit:
Of course the reason for that difference is clear.
It’s clear that the 1st native Americans were members of the Clovis Culture and it’s clear that the Clovis Culture people did not migrate to and/or immigrate into North America via the Bering Sea Land Bridge.
Given the number of Clovis sites discovered, it infers they migrated across the North Atlantic to populate eastern North America and then westward toward the Rocky Mountains.
From the Fox News article…
Samuel,
Neither DNA nor cultural artifacts support the Solutrean hypothesis. Archaeology has now recognized that people did arrive in the Americas south of the ice sheets long before Clovis, and not via the ice-free corridor between the retreating Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets, as formerly imagined.
They came via the Pacific coastal route from Siberia and Beringia until south of the ice sheets in the Pacific NW, then both inland and farther south along the coast. They even reached southern South America before Clovis time.
The extent to which the North Atlantic sea-iced over during LGM winters is subject to debate. Exposed continental shelves in Europe and North America naturally did shorten the distance. Islands now sunken and permanent ice also effectively brought the continents closer. But Clovis culture only superficially resembles Solutrean, lacks much of its characteristic features and is separated by thousands of years as well as thousands of oceanic miles, even with the shortenings mentioned above.
Yeah… The configuration of the Laurentide ice sheet would have made an Atlantic migration virtually impossible.
One of the other bits of “evidence” floated about for the Solutrean hypothesis, is the presence of European DNA (X haplotype) in some Amerind groups, particularly the Ojibwa people.
From Goebel, et al., 2008…
Haplotype X is found in many Native American populations. It has often been cited as evidence of a Late Pleistocene migration from the Iberian Peninsula to America across the Atlantic (The Solutrean Hypothesis). 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 highest Amerindian haplotype X concentration is in the Ojibwa (the Chippewa) who were first encountered by Europeans (French missionaries) near Lake Superior ca. 1640. The Altaians are from 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 Presence of Mitochondrial Haplogroup X in Altaians from South Siberia).
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.
Siberia and Beringia remained largely ice-free throughout the last glacial maximum (LGM). The Bering land bridge was open from well before the LGM up until ~13 kya. The Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets separated about 14.5 kya. Siberia, Alaska, Alberta and the Pacific Northwest are littered with archaeological evidence of the pre-Clovis migration. The only pre-Clovis human DNA identified to date (Paisley Caves, Oregon) “belonged to Native Americans in haplogroups A2 and B2, haplogroups common in Siberia and east Asia.”
While it would not have been impossible for the Solutreans to lay-over on sea ice during the long kayaking trip from France to North America and “an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”… There were no ice-free coastal areas in Greenland, Newfoundland or Labrador 14.5 kya. Apart from some now-submerged islands on the Grand Banks, there were no ice-free coastal areas from Northern Europe to Nova Scotia 14.5 kya. There is no archaeological evidence of Solutrean migration (granted such evidence would most likely be underwater). Nor is there any clear DNA evidence tying the Solutreans to the pre-Clovis or Clovis.
David,
IMO the only way the Solutrean hypothesis has a chance of working is if the conjectured immigration occurred long before the oldest Clovis material found. If small numbers of people arrived during the LGM rather than during deglaciation, then it’s possible, if not plausible, that their artifacts remain submerged on the Atlantic coastal continental shelf, from the Grand Banks to Florida.
Maybe during Heinrich Event One, c. 16.8 Ka. How about 14,920 BC, when Solutreans paddled the ocean white?
Or HE Two, earlier in the LGM, when there might not have been anyone else here to meet the skin boats.
You have me buffaloed. Are you agreeing with my first sentence, or disagreeing with the second, or both?
Translated:
C’mon Samuel, a baby can’t be ancient!
Samuel–there is a site in central Texas being worked by geologists and archaeologists from both Texas A&M, and Baylor that pre dates clovis by several thousand years. Clovis first is slowly being given up as more and more evidence of earlier human occupation is found.
jvcstone – March 14, 2017 at 4:32 pm
Now jvcstone, …. I appreciate your replying to my postings ……. but me thinks you really need to do some serious “thinking” on the subject of the Clovis origins before posting any more of your learned mimicry.
The literal fact is, …… the terms “Clovis culture”, …. “Clovis first” ….. and/or ”Clovis point” …… refers only to the type of “flint projectile point” that originated in North America circa 13,000 years ago by an ancient group of immigrants that arrived in North America several thousand years prior to the time they developed the technology for creating said “Clovis point”.
To wit, the fluted Clovis “point” that is only found in NA and nowhere else on earth.
It required hundreds, if not thousands of years, for said immigrants to develop said Clovis “napping” technology AFTER they arrived in NA ……… and hundreds, if not thousands of years, for said Clovis culture and their “napping” technology to spread throughout North America from the East coast to the West coast, as per defined by this Clovis “site map”, to wit:
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/vertpaleo/aucilla10_1/faumap.JPG
Source: Fluted points in North America
So jvcstone, carbon dating of biomass in proximity of a “Clovis point” find only determines when that “point” was lost or discarded, ….. and doesn’t tell you a damn thing about how old that “point” actually is (when it was napped) …. or when the per se original “Clovis culture” individuals arrive in North America.
And jvcstone, iffen you get bored and in need of something to do, why don’t you ask our resident “DNA expert”, David Middleton, …… where the ancestors of the Cherokee Indians immigrated from and the date they arrived on the shores in eastern North America?
Cheers, Sam C
http://people.uwec.edu/jolhm/EH3/Group8/clovisSites.jpg
Clovis points begin to appear in the fossil record about 13,000 years ago, in the Sonoran Desert…
Pre-Clovis human fossils have been found in the Pacific Northwest. Clovis sites generally go from oldest in the Southwest to youngest in the East.
Clovis points are coincident with the period of time in which humans and megafauna “coexisted” in the Americas.
And today’s modern horses in North America could also be considered an invasive species, though one brought in by man (Spaniards). Ancient North American horses died out. While today’s horse is genetically similar to ancient horses I still think it appropriate to call today’s romantically embraced “wild” horses to be feral horses. Along the line of feral hogs and feral Nutria.
Why did the buffalo cross the land bridge?
To get to the other side, of course.
And you know how to tell a buffalo from a bison, right?
you can’t wash your hands in a buffalo…
That’s very Brummy Grif
The large water tanks on wheels used by America’s military are known as buffalos.
Wash your hands at the back and don’t touch the spigot.
Griffy
You’re an expert on Buffalo, too?
David Middleton gave you a well deserved “rim-shot” for that comment.
Nice you have a sense of humor.
For those who hold the most extreme of your basic “world view”, the world will end tomorrow because of Man.
I’d rather go out laughing.
“After they arrived in Alaska, they spread quickly across the continent, taking advantage of the rich grassland resources that were part of the ice age ecosystem.”
There were rich grasslands in Alaska during an ice age? I thought the ice was miles thick in places. Where were these rich grasslands, and what did they eat on their way across the frozen land bridge until they could find the grasslands?
Beringia was largely ice-free.
http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas/geo/glaciers/glacimg/glacMap.gif
The bisons probably crossed during the summer when there is less ice as everybody knows.
Or walked across when it was frozen, Javier. Or being chased by wolves or humans.
Beringia was largely ice-free for a couple of reasons. The Brooks and Chugach Mountain Ranges supported large glacial systems, but the Yukon Valley and coastal plains (now largely submerged under the Bering and Chukchi Seas) were not covered in ice. There was extensive glaciation in Siberia to the west and the North American Cordilleran Ice Sheet to the east.
The Chugach Range blocked moisture from the south, keeping the Yukon Valley dry. The climate was also windy and dusty, but actually relatively warm in summer. The winters were however frigid. Some species survived year-round in Beringia and other migrated, as do birds and mammals to Alaska today.
The northern coastal plain, on the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean, was polar desert, inhabited by musk oxen and caribou (or reindeer). The southern coastal plain and the Yukon Valley were steppe-tundra during the Last Glacial Maximum. It was highly productive thanks to long summer days.
Not only bison and woolly mammoths entered Beringia from Siberia, but eventually people as well, possibly as early as 24,000 years ago. Modern humans were already in the Siberian Arctic 45,000 years ago.
I should add that steppe-tundra is a currently extinct biome which will presumably reassemble during the next glaciation.
Interesting. I had the same question about transiting the ice sheet.
Jeff,
I think a lot of people assume that the northern hemisphere ice sheets extended uniformly to the south. Beringia and much of northeast Asia was actually ice-free, with a steppe-tundra climate, as Chimp noted.
Maybe somebody can explain how the thickness of the permafrost layer, the soils we sample, and the properties of rocks found as deep as 1000 meters can be used to map where the ice sheets were.
“YUP”, shur nuff. And 30+ years ago the “experts” were claiming that migration occurred 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, just prior to the final Post-Glacial Meltwater Pulse that re-submerged the “land bridge”.
Then they upped it to 12,000 to 13,000 years ago.
And when more contrary evidence surfaced they again upped it to 13,000 to 14,000 years ago.
But after newer contrary evidence was discovered the “experts” are now claiming a “land bridge crossing possibly as early as 24,000 years ago”.
This recently discovered evidence: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/02/13/ancient-baby-dna-suggests-tie-to-native-americans/?intcmp=latestnews
The land bridge was open 24,000 years ago. Beringia was inhabited 24,000 years ago. What wasn’t open was a path from Beringia into the rest of North America until about 14,000 years ago.
From Goebel, et al., 2008
This is the same article you posted earlier and it still says…
Fernando Leanme
March 14, 2017 at 9:16 am
Lots of ways to know where the ice sheets were, from end moraines, such as Long Island, to gouged out basins, such as Puget Sound and the Great Lakes, to rock striations to glacial erratics to depressed crustal zones, such as Hudson’s Bay, which is under water because the weight of the massive Laurentide and previous ice sheets depressed the crust there down into the mantle.
The Dawson Range in central Yukon was not glaciated as were other regions in the north. I worked there in mining exploration. It might have been accessible to animals crossing Beringia onto the “mainland”. When I was there, this patch of ground was reputed to have the largest population of grizzlies on the continent. I sure had some reason to believe it. We mapped the geology up in the mountains themselves where rock was best exposed. If you saw a grizzly down in the valley, you walked along below the ridge on the other side! I was issued an old Lee Enfield 303 from the first world war. I didn’t want to get to cocky with that.
Or perhaps not totally extinct:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukok_Plateau
Can’t really be the same today, though, since during glacial phases the mammoth steppe existed at higher latitudes, where in summer the constant or almost constant daylight made it grassier and generally more productive, as evidenced by the great animal and plant biomass.
That is now. This was then:
http://www.yukon-news.com/media/images/2015/july/03/p23youryukon.jpg
Nitrogen (as shown by amino acids) in mammoths’ diet shows that they used a different part of their eponymous steppe than did horses, bison and other grazers, let alone browsers.
http://www.yukon-news.com/letters-opinions/making-sense-of-mixed-messages-from-the-mammoth-steppe/
Proposal to recreate Pleistocene Park on the former Beringian mammoth steppe:
http://geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Beringian-Wildlife.jpg
A lot more feasible than a Jurassic Park (so-called). Mesozoic Park would have been more apt, Triceratops, T. rex and raptors being, for example, Cretaceous creatures.
David Middleton – March 14, 2017 at 10:01 am
So what, …… @ 24K BP was the last Glacial Maximum. Sure, Beringia was surely inhabited ….. but by what? Beringia is now underwater therefore you can only extrapolate what might have inhabited that locale.
Now David, don’t be blowing smoke at me. Iffen Beringia was “open” (above sea level) then there was surely an “open” path along the western coastline into NA. Therefore, me thinks the “dates” on your above cited map are FUBAR.
And I say that because, to wit:
And the fact that the Post-Glacial Sea Level Rise proxies graph prove that Beringia was still above sea level (habitable) at 10,500 years BP, to wit:
But so what, …… that per se “open path” was confined to the western coast of North America and DID NOT include an “open path” across the top of the Rocky Mountains anywhere between northern Alaska and northern New Mexico, …… to wit:
No way in ell could your Beringia immigrants have crossed over top of the Rocky Mountains until at least after the Holocene “climate optimum” (circa 10 to 6 ky BP) had melted considerable amounts of snow and ice there on.
And iffen your Beringia immigrants could not have crossed over the mountains into what is now Montana, prior to 10,000 BP, …… then your Beringia immigrants are surely not directly related to “the baby boy of the Clovis Culture” who was buried in Montana 12,600 years ago.
So what, Asia is a big place. And it also stated that “He was more closely related to those in Central and South America” ….. which infers a Pacific crossing rather than a Beringia crossing.
And they “obfuscatinglly” discredited their own claim about the land bridge crossing when they stated ….. “The reason for that (DNA) difference isn’t clear”.
Try to follow along… Much of what was non-glaciated Beringia is still above sea level. The sites in Alaska are the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas…
?w=700
?w=680
http://csfa.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Science2008.pdf
The Cordilleran ice sheet blocked the southern exit from Beringia up until about 15,000 years ago.
http://www.sfu.ca/~qgrc/BC_icesheet.jpg
http://www.sfu.ca/~qgrc/research1.html
Evidence of Clovis culture first appears in the Southwest, about 13,000 years ago.
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/06052014/article/archaeologists-discover-one-of-the-oldest-known-clovis-hunting-sites-in-north-america
Note that the arc of Clovis sites doesn’t go over the Rocky Mountains.
Regarding the possible Pacific connection…
“Aleutian Islanders, Surui (Brazil) and Athabascans are closer to Australo-Melanesians compared to other Native Americans, such as Ojibwa, Cree and Algonquian and South American Purepecha (Mexico), Arhuaco (Colombia) and Wayuu (Colombia, Venezuela).”
This, again, supports the Beringia migration route, rather than the Kon Tiki migration route.
Samuel C Cogar
March 15, 2017 at 4:35 am
The DNA data do not support a Pacific crossing from east to west. They support migration southwards along the Pacific coast from Beringia, followed by overland migration down the corridor between the ice sheets and/or over or around the Rockies.
The Cordilleran Ice Sheet had retreated enough by 15 Ka for the Missoula Floods to begin. The central and southern US Rockies were not heavily glaciated: People from the Pacific NW could have walked across South Pass without worrying about ice.
http://geology.isu.edu/Digital_Geology_Idaho/Module12/extents.gif
Gary Pearse
March 14, 2017 at 5:40 pm
The Dawson Range wasn’t, but the Richardson Range was glaciated. It was connected with the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which blocked animals from moving south or east out of Beringia.
During the previous interglacial, called the Eemian in Europe, however, bison and other Asian immigrants had roamed down to the Lower 48 states. And they were free to do so again after the Wisconsin glaciation retreated, leading to our present interglacial, the Holocene.
David Middleton – March 15, 2017 at 9:47 am
?w=700
David M, I don’t see a Bering Sea “land bridge” on your above map, …… WHY NOT?
“NO”, … the first evidence (projectile points) of the Clovis culture that was found in the Southwest was dated at about 13,000 years ago. Which only proves there were Clovis culture members there at that time. That “find” proved absolutely nothing about the origins of the Clovis culture.
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/vertpaleo/aucilla10_1/faumap.JPG
GEEEEZE, except for the denoted California “site” …… I’m utterly surprised that you noticed that,
And iffen the “arc of Clovis sites” doesn’t go over the Rocky Mountains then how did the Clovis people and/or their ancestors get ….. from Beringia to the East coast of NA?
And the really big question for you is, ….. given the above site map, …. did the Clovis culture originate in the desert southwest (Clovis, NM) and then engage in a mass-migration toward the East coast of NA while breeding n’ birthing like a herd of rabbits as they migrated Eastward, ……… or did the Clovis culture originate somewhere on the East coast of NA and as their populations increased they began their own “Manifest Destiny” migrations into the Great Lakes Region, the Ohio and Mississippi River watersheds and then across what is now the southern US ….. and on to Clovis, NM and then California?
David M, ….. read my writin AGAIN. Only this time, with improved “reading comprehension” skills, to wit:
David M, take a good look-see at the 12K BP vertical grid on the above proxy graph, with your eyes open and your mind un-averted, of course.
It is plain enough for anyone to see that at the 12K BP vertical grid line ……. the sea level rise was still 70 meters below the current sea level …. which means that the lowest point of the Beringia “land bridge” would still have been 20 meters (66 feet) above sea level 12,000 years ago and would still have been “crossable” at 10,500 years ago.
Providing “junk science” claims as proof of “junk science” claims, …… is a “NO-NO” except for the academic lemmings.
Chimp – March 15, 2017 at 10:04 am
Shur nuff, Chimp, I’se believes, …… I’se believes.
Why it is now quite obvious to me that there t’was surely a small group of those Beringia “bridge” immigrants that were hiking down the Northwest Coastal Byway …… that suddenly decided to make a “left turn” near current day Portland, Oregon …. and trek 1,000 miles eastward into the unknown just to see “what was on the other side of the mountains” at South Pass, Montana.
YUP, that’s what I would have done iffen I was one of those Beringia “bridge” trekkers.
Because the Goebel map shows the present day sea level. This map shows the Late Pleistocene sea level…
Which is why I wrote, “Evidence of Clovis culture first appears in the Southwest, about 13,000 years ago.”
Since the oldest sites are in the Southwest, the odds are that the Clovis culture originated in the Southwest and then spread, mostly to the east due to the higher density of Clovis points found in the east.
Here is the map of the Clovis sites merged with the map of the Rocky Mountains…
?w=680
Note how the Clovis managed to avoid crossing the Rocky Mountains.
This is an ice sheet map at 15,000 radiocarbon (14C) years ago.
?w=680
Note that the broad, shallow continental shelf of Beringia was above sea level and ice-free, while the narrow, steep continental self of the Pacific Northwest was almost totally covered by the Cordilerran ice sheet.
Here’s a closer view…
?w=680
Here are the maps for 12,000 and 10,000 14C years ago…
?w=680
?w=680
Some humans probably did arrive south of the ice sheet before 15,000 years ago. Most moved south after the ice sheets began to separate. The “post-split gene flow between Siberians and Native Americans” ended when rising sea levels separated Siberia from Alaska between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago.
YUP, shur nuff, and that’s exactly what happened when the first northern European immigrants of the 14th and 15th century arrived on shore in southern California and then spread, mostly to the east due to the higher density of the great cities they built on the East coast of America.
YUP, shur nuff, except for that one (1) Clovis infant child that flew over the Rocky Mountains 12,600 years ago to a place 1,000 miles to the East and then buried itself in the ground in what is now the State of Montana.
OH, MY, MY, …… so you decided it was best that you revise the “junk science” claim that you cited earlier when you quoted, ….. to wit:
And don’t you be fergettin to figger out the DNA origin of the Cherokees.
Thanks David. I’ve often lost valuable sleep with questions about the giant long-horned morphotype Bison latifrons during the last interglaciation. I rest peacefully now.
Apparently there were three species of bison, one larger than the modern version, and another still larger than that. The two larger species were driven to extinction, almost certainly by Pre-Columbian hunting.
It’s also likely that the wealth of wildlife reported in early colonial North America reflected recovery of previously hunted faunal populations; the recovery following from the collapse of Native American societies due to exposure to Old World diseases. That would include the large herds of modern bison.
As an homage to the once vast bison herds many climate scientists are dropping bison paddies across our fruited plains.
OT but….first I hate naming snow storms and second…stella is gonna suck here
20 or so inches of snow due here, possibly 24. long days driving plow truck
Ok I am not a scientist or even a collage grad but could some one please explain to me (yes i am being sarcastic) how any animal that evolved on earth be a invasive species on earth? This is the same flawed logic I find when someone tells me I am not a Local to Washington state because 50 years ago I was born in California?? I have lived in 9 states growing up but have lived in Washington the longest. 5 times longer then were I was born. So back to the bison. Why are they a invasive species on the planet they are from?? I ask because I see laws and wildlife management based on this idea. Shooting horses and donkeys in Ca, Not planting fish in other areas because of ” native population” . Is there really a difference between the spread of species by animals or by man?
Ecological isolation. Every island and every continent has its own assortment of species, its unique ecology. Bring a snake to an island where snakes have never been and poof..dozens of bird species go extinct. Or let pigs in where dodos used to nest. Or dogs and people where elephant birds evolved. What takes continental drift millions of years to do people can do in decades. So now we have camels and rabbits in Australia, and tumbleweeds in North American, and thousands of other examples of ecological disruption. In the midst of which global warming is absolutely negligible. –AGF
A species is invasive if the ecosystem it invades isn’t adapted to deal with it, so it disrupts a previously balanced system. Kudzu comes to mind.
Sometimes robust ecosystems are able to incorporate the newcomer, but often not.
Bison were able to integrate into the steppe-tundra biome, in part because they were adapted to similar environments in Eurasia, where mammoth and horses (which evolved in North America, along with rhinos, llamas and camels, then were extirpated here) also lived. What we call elk (wapiti) and moose (elk in Europe) are also Eurasian immigrants. Mule deer evolved in North America.
Before the Pleistocene/Holocene megafaunal extinctions, North America sported four different proboscideans: woolly and steppe mammoths (elephant family), mastodons and the ancient gomphotheres, which invaded North America from South America after the Isthmus of Panama formed. Their ancestors had much earlier passed through North America. Some consider the giant Imperial and Columbian mammoths to be separate species, along with the dwarf Channel Island race, but IMO they’re all subspecies of the steppe mammoth.
The problem is the word “invasive”, which implies that it is automatically bad or harmful. “Non-native” would be a better name. The whole “invasive species” thing seems to have become an obsession.
Invasive…
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invasive
IMO “invasive” is correctly applied only to species which are indeed invasive, ie disruptive on established ecosystems. I can see some of the worst outside my window right now, appearing for the first time this year.
Invasive starlings, let loose in Central Park by a miscreant who should roast in Hell, have had a horrific effect on indigenous bird species. I wish I could discharge a shotgun in my town and flock shoot them. I could also do without the Asian Indian pigeons, which were introduced first in the Bahamas, cooing loudly around the starlings, although I suppose they would come in handy if we ever undergo a siege.
In my opinion “invasive species” is a bigger ecological problem than climate change.
Native species can be invasive and I still do not have the answer as to how to certainly identify an “exotic” species if you are not so told. True that they can cause havoc but the mentioned kudzu is rare (one place?) west of the Mississippi River in Louisiana and rabbits in Australia look out of place like everything else, but I saw lots more marsupials in the Snowy Mountains. Muskrats cause large “eat-outs” in some Louisiana marshes but this may have been a little out of their native range at times. Ecologists call it something like filling empty niches which are never static and the pie can sometimes be expanded. Incidentally, bison made it in recent historic times to Louisiana where the French called them Boeufs and also rarely to Mexico where they were called Cíbolo.
H. D. Hoese
March 14, 2017 at 5:54 pm
“Invasive” isn’t properly applied to an indigenous species which evolved in its present environment or has been long established, even if for some reason it runs out of control there. Nor are all introduced species necessarily invasive, as with dandelions, for instance.
The US is plagued with lots of invasive species besides kudzu. It’s usually easy for locals to tell if a species is new to the habitat, as with the starlings and pigeons in my AO. An estimated 50,000 non-native species have been introduced to the US, including livestock, crops, pets and other non-invasive species. Economic damages associated with invasive species’ effects and control costs are estimated at $120 billion per year, but that doesn’t include the cost of loss of native species affected by the newcomers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species_in_the_United_States#Notable_invasive_species
According to C Mann in “1492” there is no archeological evidence that Native Americans ate buffalo. Accordingly we may surmise that the Plains Indian culture began with the introduction of modern horses and lasted till the railroad, maybe a couple of centuries. Natives on foot just couldn’t catch ’em. This certainly helps to explain why they survived the Pleistocene extinctions when dozens of big game did not. But it remains to be explained why horses disappeared and bison did not. Any hunters out there who have hunted both? –AGF
Early humans in the Americas did indeed hunt bison. They drove them over cliffs. The larger species of bison were wiped out by Archaic Amerindians, after they and their Paleoamerican predecessors drove even bigger megafauna to extinction.
But the advent of the horse and rifle did doom the surviving, smaller bison, whether white hunters had attacked them or not. Just the horse alone threatened bison, as woodland culture Indians moved out from the eastern forests onto the Great Plains, as the Sioux did from Minnesota, to take advantage of this gigantic resource. Arrows and lances were bad enough, but the advent of firearms sealed the fate of the bison herds.
We raised bison when I was growing up.
Early humans and their dogs hunted just about everything. The domestication of camp wolves was probably a very significant enabling factor in the human domination of the Americas… Symbiotic invasive species.
Assumptions, not evidence.
AmerIndians hunted pretty much any wildlife around.
Man, in the wild, is also a carrion eater who would take advantage of any large animal kill after the large predators ate their fill.
Yes, when the right cliffs and animals are conveniently located near each other.
Only the vast majority of cliffs do not show large piles of bone debris at their bases from this tactic getting used frequently.
Side tale:
My Father bought some critters, including pigs and castrated calf.
The calf quickly grew large, but was still amiable enough that just walking alongside was enough to bring it back into the barn.
The pigs also grew rapidly and we fed them a wide range of garden/orchard wastes along with pig feed; (though the pigs loved dog food more).
When market time came for the pigs, we encountered a major difficulty getting a pig into our truck, technically a very large International station wagon.
First each one of us tried alone, then we tried as groups of two and three; all unsuccessful.
One of my Brothers had been up well before dawn to help work a dairy farm and was currently taking a nap before he went back for the afternoon.
My Father told my younger Brothers to go wake him up. Mostly, because that Brother had gained ox-like strength harvesting hay.
Groggy and wiping sleep from his eye, the newly roused Brother grumpily wanted to know what the problem was.
John was bemused, he told us we were doing it wrong.
First getting the pig’s attention with a bit of food he then got the pig to start running after the food in his hand. Grabbing the pig’s ear and head he twisted the pig around so it was not running at the truck. Up the ramp went the pig, into the truck, all of the way up into the driver’s seat.
John closed the tailgate and told us the pig was in and he was going back to bed. We got the pig to the back of the truck with a little more food and my Dad headed off to the butcher.
Steering large wild animals is incredibly more difficult. Nor are all that many animals so dumb that they run over obvious cliffs. Otherwise, via the Darwinian factors, they’d soon eradicate themselves.
There are many amazing discoveries in archaeology.
However, two things cause me to laugh when reading about an archaeology dig.
A) The tendency to decide that many objects invariably have religious significance.
B) The tendency for archaeologists to automatically blame man for any/all extinctions without direct evidence.
And yes, I read a recent paper about a lady proving that ancient man cut tendons from bones.
Big deal. Tendons are/were very valuable to ancient man. Any tendon source, including carrion, is desirable for harvesting tendons.
I’ve also wondered why archaeologists don’t go put their theories into trials? Set up a goal area and pretend it is a cliff?
They can lead a small team in Africa to incite elephants to run into a specific goal?
Or corralling African lions or American panthers?
Perhaps getting a wolf pack to run into a specific goal?
How about getting African rhinos to run into a specific goal?
Or getting a wild herd of camels to do the same?
Remember, in imitation of archaic man, all this must be accomplished by people on foot, in very small teams. Preferably wearing smelly stiff furs.
Getting one animal to run over a cliff is hard. Getting a herd of them to run over a cliff is easy.
The reason for this is only the animals at the front of the herd can see the cliff. The animals in the back can’t see it, but they keep running because there is still something they are trying to get away from this.
As a result, even though the animals at the front try to stop, they can’t because they are being pushed by the ones in the back.
ATheoK —
In a number of cases, there is direct evidence that when man entered a region, most of the megafauna died off within a few hundred years. There are hundreds of these species which are well documente4d The most obvious is Australia where the continent is small enough and the arrival of man was delayed enough that there is distinct pattern. This pattern also repeats itself in Madagascar and New Zealand — the extinctions occurred shortly after humans arrived. That is the one common event.
Now, that doesn’t make humans evil or bad — only successful as a species. A more successful species is wheat which has been able to grow from an isolated weed to one of the predominant plant forms on the planet by exploiting the apex predator of the planet. Does that make wheat evil?
There are other theories as to the cause of these extinctions. We could never know for certain that hunting caused the extinctions. But, the timing is the key factor. It could be a human disease. Or it could be a change to the ecosystem which was precipitated by man. No expert has said that it is an absolute fact that man hunted these animals to extinction, but it is the prevailing theory.
Here is another (more foolish) theory — https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27952-megafauna-extinction-dna-evidence-pins-blame-on-climate-change/,/url>
ATheoK
March 14, 2017 at 11:26 am
I have decades of experience herding large animals on foot (as well as by horse and vehicle). Eskimos use piles of stone, which to the herded animals look like men, to help channel a herd where they want it to go. Similar cairns are found on the Great Plains, used by Indians before the advent of horses, and maybe still after.
While the Lewis and Clark expedition didn’t observe such a drive, Lewis described the buffalo jump hunt technique in his journal:
“(O)ne of the most active and fleet young men is selected and disguised in a robe of buffalo skin… he places himself at a distance between a herd of buffalo and a precipice proper for the purpose; the other Indians now surround the herd on the back and flanks and at a signal agreed on all show themselves at the same time moving forward towards the buffalo; the disguised Indian or decoy has taken care to place himself sufficiently near the buffalo to be noticed by them when they take to flight and running before them they follow him in full speed to the precipice; the Indian (decoy) in the mean time has taken care to secure himself in some cranny in the cliff… the part of the decoy I am informed is extremely dangerous.”
But well worth the risk.
The fact is that “buffalo” and horse jumps are found around the Holarctic world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump#Historical_sites
You can also ambush herds at river fords, as we know that ancient humans did. They even drew pictures of this practice in Paleolithic western Europe. Other sites which offered natural funneling opportunities were exploited, as at the French Rock of Solutre, which give the Solutrean culture its name.
I’m with you A TheoK. I can just see them all gathered around the campfire and their leader says, “We need some meat. Now we could all split up and hunt rabbits, squirrels, beavers, fish and birds. You might get bit but that only hurts for a moment. And instead of using our carefully crafted clovis points and risking their loss or breakage we’d be able to use just ordinary old, laying-around-everywhere rocks and maybe clubs and sticks. On the other hand we could all go out in a group; see if we can find and corner something weighing a ton or two and keep running up to it and poking it with sharp stones tied to a stick until it dies. And when some of us get back we’ll share with the widows and children of our comrades who were stomped to death on the expedition. Do I hear a motion from the floor?”
Before I’m ready to credit small bands of Stone Age hunters with causing mass extinction I would love to find out how efficient their hunting methods were in dealing with very large and therefore very tough and dangerous game. In addition, as these animals neared extinction what sort of energy would have to be expended by people traveling on foot to seek them as their numbers dwindled?
When it comes to cut marks on bones they don’t say anything definitive about how it was made to lie still while the hacking was under way. Butchering can result from slaughter or serendipitous discover or carrion.
JustAnOldGuy
March 14, 2017 at 1:08 pm
As I replied to ATheoK, there are all kinds of evidence for humans causing the extinction of ancient bison and other American megafauna, just as on other continents and islands. It’s not just an assumption, but a well-supported hypothesis for most species and an observed fact for others.
The movements of herd animals are predictable and can be exploited. Or they can be followed. There aren’t just a few buffalo jumps, but lots of them, found where that cliffs and bison migration paths coincide. That Paleo and Archaic Indians killed and ate bison and even larger mammals is not in doubt. Clovis points have been found inside mammoth remains at vital positions.
Another factor to consider is that large animals have longer reproductive cycles, and females and young are preferentially hunted. That’s how American bison were nearly wiped out in the 19th century.
The temporal pattern of extinction is also instructive. The biggest megafauna were killed off first, ie mammoths, then bison only later, and only the largest species of their genus. Horses, camels, ground sloths, etc were wiped out after the woolly and Columbian mammoths as well. to be followed by the predators which specialized on megaherbivores and their young.
Just an old guy — they did exactly that. Just change your response from mammoths to whales. It would go something like this —
But that is exactly what they did. You can phrase it in any silly way that you want — but what we nearly did to the whales in the modern era is the exact same thing that was done to megafauna on land.
One large animal had tremendous amount of meat and animal fat. The animal skins were warm and could be used for dozens of people. It was worth taking the time to figure out the best way to hunt and kill it using the tribal resources. Some people have theorized that the entire reason homo sapiens crossed the Bering Strait land bridge was due to following these large megafauna as they depleted the supplies in Asia.
They kill a rabbit and one or two people eat for a day. One mammoth could support a tribe for weeks.
First, there are a couple of tidbits — it was not exactly “mass extinction”. It was hundreds of species over tens of thousands of years. These happen to be the megafauna (everything from mammoths to giant sloths.) These species were prepared for competitive species that existed in the area, but man was a whole unique species in its aggression and tactical skill. The megafauna have long gestation periods which meant that they could not recover from this “invasive species” quickly enough. The more success a tribe had, the more children they had and they bigger area the covered. Humans also clear cut lands. This changed the way the megafauna could hide from predators.
As there numbers dwindled, the hunters moved on to smaller prey, but the species were decimated. Some of these animals were pretty bizarre like the diprotodon There is evidence of isolated pockets of mammoths up to 4,000-5,000 years ago.
“Before I’m ready to credit small bands of Stone Age hunters with causing mass extinction I would love to find out how efficient their hunting methods were in dealing with very large and therefore very tough and dangerous game.”
Would a 120 000 years old wooden spear found in place in a dead elephant be good enough? If so google “Lehringen spear”
tty,
The Schöningen spears are between 380,000 and 400,000 years old.
lorcanbonda
March 14, 2017 at 7:29 pm
Good analogy.
Some whale species were hunted to extinction in historic times, like the Atlantic gray whale in the 18th century. Others, such as the blue, humpback and Atlantic right whales, were rescued at the last minute by international pressure.
Same with the American bison, which was almost hunted to extinction, but saved at the last minute, in part by Molly, wife of former “buffalo” hunter Charles Goodnight, of the eponymous Trail. There were four other saviors:
http://www.llanoestacado.org/files/bison.htm
American bison were cut into Northern and Southern herds before their final near-extermination in the 1870s, thanks to the railroads. The Goodnights helped to revive the Southern herd.
There is that assumption that rough correlation equals causation.
None of the “overwhelming evidence” is direct evidence; nor is that evidence hard dated to the exact dates of megafauna extinctions.
Nor is it explained in any of the mysterious correlation studies why megafauna are eliminated, but other large fauna are not exterminated.
“Piles of rocks resemble man to herded animals” – sheer assumption. Not fact.
“Decades of experience herding large animals” – And that proves? You can herd animals. How many cliffs did you drive them over?
“Similar cairns are found on the Great Plains” – Indeed? And!?
And the sum total of all these assumptions is that man exterminated the megafauna using cairns and cliffs in a relatively few places?
As I mentioned earlier. The bones along the bottom of the cliff are a giveaway to when cliffs were used regularly.
In spite of extrapolations without evidence, there are not cairns and cliffs located everywhere. They’re nto even enough locations to seriously impair migrations.
Which cliff has the bones of the verified last megafauna?
Bolding is mine for emphasis.
In retrospect, we then assume the Zulu spear point is explicitly designed to kill elephants?
When large dangerous animals, especially predators, are around, clovis points are remarkably well designed for defense purposes against large very dangerous animals.
One would not try to use a small bird point when stopping a tiger, lion or short faced bear.
Ishi walked out of the wilderness near Mount Lassen. During his last few years of life, Ishi demonstrated and taught many lost Native American techniques, including how to knapp a clovis point. Until Ishi demonstrated knapping the shallow groove, that piece of ancient technology was thought lost ages ago.
Clovis type points were made right up to the twentieth century.
I am amused when I see the “Clovis arc”. Native Americans were discommoded by the mountain ranges, but they were aware of and did utilize every pass.
What I notice when I see the “Clovis arc” image is how close it represents volcanic ash fall maps from the Northwest volcanoes.
Sediments, ash falls, local civilization bloat; all contribute to or detract from easy point collection.
Yes, a few, very few Native American sites have been carefully stratified and dug carefully to depth. Most have not.
Native Americans were also recorded donning furs of deer and buffalo so they could sneak into herds to shoot an animal. Somehow, I have difficulty envisioning a paleoindian wearing an elephant hide.
Those alleged attempts by pointy headed lab coats pretending to seriously attempt using old type weapons are quite amusing. There was one documentary where they built a mechanical saber tooth tiger and then had the mechanical head bite various non life threatening parts of a carcass.
Those lame attempts rank right up there with Al Gore’s and Billy Nye’s fake CO2 experiment.
Can a clovis point on a spear kill an elephant? Yes.
Can one man easily drive a clovis pointed spear right into the heart of an elephant? That I doubt very much.
That thought doesn’t improve much when considering many of the megafauna; e.g. wooly rhino.
Yes, there is an amazing amount of knowledge regarding glaciation, possible migration routes and archaeology. That knowledge does not make up for the glaring inconsistencies and massive gaps between a little evidence and gross assumptions.
There are no “Native Americans”. The first ones here crossed the same Bering Land Bridge after they wiped out the megafauna in Asia.
The historical record shows that each time humans entered a new continent, the majority of the megafauna were wiped out within hundreds of years. This did not happen in Africa because the megafauna and humans evolved at the same time. In other words, the African megafauna retained respect for the Apex predator. In other continents, the megafauna were nearly wiped out before they could develop instincts to avoid humans or fight back.
So, yes, the first Americans did hunt every species of megafauna. They chased mammoths all the way down to the tip of South America. Bisons survived because they had better instincts that the much more appetizing mammoths and rodents of unusual size.
Plains Indian horse riding culture evolved after the introduction of European domesticated horses.
Correct me if wrong, but IMO mammoths didn’t make it to South America. Central America, yes. Columbian mammoth remains have been found in Costa Rica.
IMO you’re thinking of the mastodons hunted in southern Chile. Mastodons belong to a different family than mammoths and elephants. They were primarily woodland creatures, whereas the elephant family are mainly adapted to grassland or mixed woods and prairie, although the Asian elephant can survive in fairly dense forest.
Chimp — Forgive my oversimplification. I’m no expert, but I don’t think either the Mastodon nor the Mammoth has been found in South America. There were several species of those classes in South America — one of which is a type of mastodon (stegomastodon?) and another a type of elephant and there were many other megafauna depleted at the end of the pleistocene.
There were mastodons in South America, along with gomphotheres, but not mammoths, which are members of the elephant family of the Order Proboscidea. Mastodons and gomphotheres belong to other families. Stegomastodon was a gomphothere, not a mastodon, so the nomenclature is confusing. It only gets worse, since mastodons are in the Family Mammutidae, which looks as if it should contain mammoths, but doesn’t.
From Wikipedia…
Mastodons ranged even farther to the south…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon
Stegomastodons were present throughout much of South America…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stegomastodon
I was definitely ignorant enough to believe that the Columbian Mammoth was not in South America. I guess my clue should have been that it is not spelled “Colombian Mammoth”. Maybe they should call it the pre-Columbian Mammoth to be clear.
@lorcanbonda. I guess your theory is probably the prevailing one as to why African megafauna was not wiped out. I don’t buy it! I refuse to believe that it was possible for humans to wipe out these species in N.A. while humans were somehow outsmarted by big game in Africa. I don’t care how wary these animals were in Africa, humans would have figured out how to fool them. The answer to that puzzle must lie in animal population densities in Africa vs. N.A.. or some other peculiarity that has gone unnoticed.
John,
To the wariness of African megafauna must be added the fact that tropical environments don’t change as drastically as do temperate and polar climates. The one0two combo punch of advanced hunters and the normal fragmentation and reduction of higher latitude habitats during glacial termination knocked off the megafauna of other continents.
Much of Australia lies at lower latitudes less subject to climatic variation, but it is more akin to oceanic islands than to Eurasia and the Americas. No one doubts that humans caused the rapid extinctions on New Zealand and other isolated islands.
“There are no “Native Americans”. The first ones here crossed the same Bering Land Bridge after they wiped out the megafauna in Asia”
So I guess that means there are no native people anywhere outside Africa?
More accurately… Everyone who was born in the Americas is a native American. Amerinds were just the first wave of immigrants.
John — it’s not that the African megafauna outsmarted humans, it was that their preservation instincts were better. Once man appeared in new continents, the megafauna had no instincts to defend against this invasive predator. By the time they could develop those instincts, they were already on the decline. In Africa, the animals had sufficient instincts to be wary of humans. Instincts to herd or run were better developed so that those species could survive even as individual members were killed.
Gareth, my only point about the “Native Americans” was to point out agfosterjr’s error in his CMann quote. The error is that the Americans discovered by European explorers are the same as those who arrived across the Bering Strait as though nothing changed here during those millenia. By the time the Europeans had arrived, Native Americans and the American animals were in balance (only to be disrupted again by the arrival of guns and horses.)
agfosterjr,
Don’t know much about bison history, but Sierra Vista, AZ, has a Clovis site where mammoths were stampeded over a cliff into an arroyo where they were sitting ducks. The site is at a trailhead that extends for miles along the San Pedro River, so I visit it from time to time. (It has been well documented with explanatory signage for visitors. Access is easy, but not widely publicized, I suspect to keep vandalism down. Make local inquiry.)
At any rate I am sure pre-Columbian tribes were well versed in taking down big game without chasing them on horses. But hunting them so extinction? I find that a bit hard to believe.
It didn’t take much to wipe out megafauna during the deglacial millennia. Habitat was already being restricted for some species and broken up into isolated pockets. The megafauna had survived similar warm interglacials previously, but the addition of modern human hunters doomed them.
Yep. The Gulf of Mexico has about 30,000′ of Pleistocene sedimentary column for a good reason.
Every deglaciation would have been accompanied by massive flooding. Well-preserved Siberian mammoths are generally found in flood deposits.
I shouldn’t have used the term ‘bison’ so loosely when I meant buffalo, but as for humans hunting numerous species of big game to extinction, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. Wherever people went, to Australia, Madagascar, North America, and all the islands at sea, the big game disappeared, with plenty of evidence that humans were eating it. Where humans couldn’t go, like Wrangle Island, mammoths survived much longer. Some of the extinctions occurred in historical times and are well documented, like the dodo, passenger pigeon, and the great auk. Granted, these are not big game, but they are representative of the process. Dodos were sitting ducks, waiting with their eggs for doom. Passenger pigeons numbered in the billions but farmers managed to eliminate them. The lesser auk survived, the big auk made for more efficient feeding. Killing mammoths was easy compared to killing whales.
There can be little doubt humans hunted mammoths to extinction and not buffaloes, but it may be that buffaloes were the most aggressive of any of the big game. –AGF
Mann was not talking about anything so ancient–what he was saying is that in 1492 Amerinds were not eating buffalo, that there is no archeological evidence that they did in the centuries prior to 1500. I’ll get the book out later and comment more fully. I have never intended to argue that humans were not responsible for any of the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions. –AGF
“1491” mentions buffalo hunting on at least 3 pages: 177,282,360. Passenger pigeon bones are rare in archeological sites. The pigeons, elk, and buffalo greatly expanded their populations after the Indian populations were decimated (p.360). Mea culpa. –AGF
Bison:
Buffalo:
http://www.military-today.com/apc/buffalo_mrap.jpg
Near the end of the Yukon gold rush, a number of bison were brought to Cormacks, Yukon and turned loose with the idea that they would multiply and serve as hardy beef for more permanent settlements. After a few years, they disappeared and we’re thought to have perished.
In 1969, I was in charge of a small mining exploration team camp on an island in Snag River (to minimize grizzly visits which were terrorizing our competitors’ camps). The Snag lies on the east side of the Kluane Range in the lee of prevailing westerlies and although the coldest temperature recorded in Canada is in the Snag R. region. There is almost no snow in winter.
One morning, a helicopter from another camp landed on our island and a Dutch geologist jumped out in a state of excitement which I thought likely because of a bear problem. He explained that he ran into a herd of musk oxen not far from our camp. I jumped in the chopper to see this unlikely sight and it turned out to be a herd of bison. I informed the wild life folks and they were convinced the mystery of the lost Cormacks buffalo had been solved since this herd was unknown to them.
Careful how you collect and interpret your bison samples!
Dangit. ‘Carmacks’. I believe a more literate and knowledgeable language master is required on the android team. If you have a decent vocabulary and level of general knowledge you are driven nuts by cell phone ‘helpers’.
I can’t add anything, but I just wanted to say thanks to all the contributors for all the interesting comments. This is why I, and I’m sure a lot of people, keep coming back here.
My thanks to David and Anth@ny for publishing a science post only peripherally related to climate. I’m glad that it has aroused so much interest among blog readers.
I’m a Quaternary geology junkie… Which is good because most days, I go to work in the Plio-Pleistocene.
If geologic chronology made sense, there would be no need for the Quaternary. It would all be the Pleistocene, since the Holocene is just another run of the mill interglacial. And the Quaternary Period should probably be in the Neogene Period.
The geologic powers that be did a good thing in moving the last age of the Pliocene into the Pleistocene, which doesn’t leave much for the Pliocene, especially compared to the long Miocene.
IMO the Oligocene Epoch should also be moved to the Neogene Period from the Paleogene, since the Antarctic ice sheets formed then. That would leave a pretty short Paleogene, with just two epochs, but so be it. Those epochs were warm, while earth has been cooling by fits and starts since the Oligocene.
It also makes no sense that the long Cretaceous Period has only two epochs, while the shorter Triassic and Jurassic have three. And the short Silurian Period exists mainly because of the historic feud between its founder Murchison and his former friend and colleague, the Cambrian “system” advocate, Darwin’s geology mentor Rev. Sedgwick. At least there was a mass extinction event at the Ordovician-Silurian boundary.
Not to mention that the six-period Paleozoic Era (541-252 Ma) is a lot longer than the three-period Mesozoic (252-66 Ma).
I could be wrong ,but were,t bison hunted to extinction as a way to eliminate native americans?
They weren’t hunted quite to extinction… But I’m fairly certain that this quote is a pretty good indication that the ultimate goal was to subdue the Plains Indian nations…
From the picture, I thought you were going to discus Wolly Mammoth and Mastodons. I can’t wait until they clone some up. I’ve developed a taste for their meat in “Skyrim”.
There is a lot of information at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre website. The part on the steppe-bison is here:
http://www.beringia.com/exhibit/ice-age-animals/steppe-bison
One of the authors of the story is Duane Froese who co-authored “Ice Age Old Crow”. Old Crow is a village in northern Yukon.
http://www.tc.gov.yk.ca/publications/ice_age_old_crow.pdf
That is a really cool website!
I agree, excellent info.
When I was in Yukon Territory in 1969-70, the Yukon newspaper Whitehorse Star (?) had a column written by a colorful aboriginal women Edith Josee entitled “Here are the News”. I see she has been active more recently.
http://oldcrow.ca/news.htm
The Whitehorse Star motto under the masthead read: “Illigitimus non carborundum” Dont let the bastards grind you down! The editor at the time (I’ve forgotten his name), as legend has it, got drunk at a party and decided to see if he could phone Ho Chi Min. He managed to get put through to Hanoi and got connected through a San Francisco operator somehow. When the phone was answered he simply said: “Hi Ho” and then laughed like a goosed hyena.
Does Mr Trump know about these immigrants ? Maybe he should ban them until he can figure out what exactly is going on .
Too late, they’ve already had their anchor babies.
I’ve seen bison living in the Bonx.. at the zoo. More than you would expect.
During glaciations sealevel drops by 100 to 200 meters. The average depth of the oceans is 2.8km. Thus between 4% and 7% of all water on the planet is locked in land ice. In the grand scheme of things this is not “much”.
Yet land ice makes a big difference in sea level. So does ocean temperature.
During the last glacial maximum, sea level was about 400 feet lower than today. Glaciers and ice sheets then covered almost a third of the land, of which there was more area, thanks to lower MSL, versus only a little less than 10% today (of a smaller area).
During the last interglacial, the Eemian, some 125,000 years ago, MSL was about 18 feet higher than now (without benefit of a Neanderthal industrial age). During the Pliocene, c. three million years ago, it might have been up to 165 feet higher. During previous even warmer epochs and periods, it was higher still, as during the Cretaceous, when the Arctic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico were connected by a seaway across the middle of North America.
I know what caused the high sea level in the Sangamonian (Eemian)…
Sauropod flatulence?
http://o.aolcdn.com/dims-shared/dims3/GLOB/legacy_thumbnail/800×450/format/jpg/quality/85/http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2012/07/flintstonesmobilegermany.jpg
They’re ruminants so they can obviously swim but does anyone know what the range for a swimming bison is?
Island hopping isn’t as silly as it sounds.
They can cross fairly sizeable rivers if the current isn’t too swift.
Except that there was no need for bison to swim from Siberia to Alaska during glacial phases.
But it widens the time window if they could travel between green islands rather than walking along a grassless isthmus.
M,
The isthmus wasn’t grassless and it wasn’t an isthmus. It was a vast subcontinent the size of the Indian plate, a thousand miles by more than that.
Its southern and northern plains are submerged, and its center. The north was polar desert, but the south, like the Yukon Valley, was lush steppe-tundra, verdant in summer.
Some Berignian imagery:
PS:
The Bering Strait is shallow, like the English Channel, although there is a sunken lake at its deepest part, which isn’t very profound.
The Diomede Islands, which stick up out of it, would have made great lookout points for spotting the herds of mammoth, horse, bison, antelope, etc, which migrated across the steppe-tundra landscape.
Of course, today people and animals can and do still walk to Siberia from Alaska across the winter sea ice.
Yupik Eskimos live on both sides of the Strait.
Chimp, Interesting.
Thank you.
M,
You’re most welcome.
Asian immigrants like mastodons, mammoths, bison, elk and moose didn’t need to swim to make the trip to North America. Ditto for rhinos, horses and camels headed in the opposite direction. For most of the past three million years, the continents have been connected by dry (maybe boggy) land. Bison might well have crossed some pretty big rivers, however.
Just to point out, that for American Bison, the word American Buffalo or Buffalo is acceptable, and was used first. So, there can’t be any correction using Bison or Buffalo, both are accepted.
Per Wikipedia:
The term “buffalo” is sometimes considered to be a misnomer for this animal, and could be confused with “true” buffalos, the Asian water buffalo and the African buffalo. However, “bison” is a Greek word meaning ox-like animal, while “buffalo” originated with the French fur trappers who called these massive beasts bœufs, meaning ox or bullock—so both names, “bison” and “buffalo”, have a similar meaning. The name “buffalo” is listed in many dictionaries as an acceptable name for American buffalo or bison. In reference to this animal, the term “buffalo” dates to 1625 in North American usage when the term was first recorded for the American mammal.[11] It thus has a much longer history than the term “bison”, which was first recorded in 1774.[citation needed] The American bison is very closely related to the wisent or European bison.
English “buffalo” entered our language from Spanish, Portuguese or French, from a Latin original. The scientific generic name Bubalus however is from Greek.
“Bison” is also from a different Latin original, cognate with the Germanic original of “wisent”, the European bison. The modern American bison is Bison bison in Linnaean binomial nomenclature.
“Why did the buffalo cross the land bridge?”
To prove to the possum it could be done.
I’ll be here all week – don’t forget to tip your waitress. 😀
Our waitress:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRd1HeYO1G3wx6PQAAiz-hgRwGHOeE8zqeSoT78H9Dgk8P8PC-v
question: did any of these animals ever walk back?
Gary,
All the time. To them, NE Siberia and NW America were same, same.
I believe horses evolved in North America, but became extinct until European colonisation.
That’s right. Camels, llamas and rhinos also evolved here but survived on other continents to which they had migrated.
Why?
To get to the good grass that mammoths and horses weren’t using.
Just as on the Serengeti Plain today, there was a grazing and browsing succession on the steppe-tundra. Ruminants like bison and saiga antelope could use forage not fully utilized by horses and mammoths. There were also the Ice Age equivalent of gazelles.
While it may be more taxonomically correct to call buffalo bison,you taxonomic purests can go on and call them bison; to the rest of us, they are buffalo.
The main purpose of taxonomy is purism.
No “may” about it.
Bison and buffalo belong to different genera in the bovine subfamily. Bison can hybridize with cattle and yaks, so are closer to the genus Bos than is genus Bubalus. Water buffalo.and domestic cattle cannot hybridize. In laboratory experiments, the embryos fail around the eight-cell stage. The African buffalo has been placed in its own genus, Syncerus, reflecting its grown-together horns.
If in common parlance, you want to call bison buffalo, of course you’re free to be incorrect. I didn’t object when people called our bison buffalo. Neither did the bison.
So if I get the theory right, the Bison (aka Buffalo) came across the land bridge. If that is true, how come there were no tigers (the guys with stripes) in North America.?????
It’s not a theory. It’s an observation.
Tigers are woodland creatures, adapted to hunting in forests, whether boreal or tropical (and formerly temperate, but the Caspian tiger was driven to extinction by the Roman thirst for bloody games). Their habitat doesn’t exist in Beringia during glacial intervals, although it does in interglacials, but not continuously on land and of course there’s the Bering Strait.
Some speculated that the cave lion might have been more closely related to tigers than modern lions, but genetics, anatomy and even art work have shown this conjecture to be false.
Not to mention frozen feline remains.
Why aren’t there any bison in Siberia?
Canadian bison have been introduced to Siberia, but no living descendants exist there of the primordial bison which lived in the region thousands of years ago. They went extinct with the Siberian mammoths and other megaherbivores.
Lots of frozen remains have been found, however:
http://www.livescience.com/48645-bison-mummy-photos.html
And their kin the wisent still live in Eastern Europe, where they barely managed to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_bison#Genetic_history
Wisent are apparently hybrids of steppe bison and aurochs, the extinct ancient wild ox, ancestral to European domestic cattle breeds.
There are no indigenous bison left in Alaska, either. The Pleistocene species died out. The environment of Alaska is also no longer suitable for bison. During the Holocene, it’s either too woody or tundra-like. The grassy steppe-tundra which they favored is extinct in Alaska and most of the world, yet was the world’s largest biome during the last glaciation.
So, maybe the American Indian as we know them are not the original immigrants to this continent. Can we figure out what group were the first? Do we have any information on the Clovis people and who might have killed them off?
It’s hard to get the needed DNA data because American Indian groups resist testing.
Finding out what groups were first is also difficult since if there were any people south of the ice sheets before they started melting, they were few and far between. Discovering their remains is a matter of luck and guess work.
However evidence for people more than 30,000 years ago has been claimed for some sites in both Americas. Archaeological material can’t always elucidate ethnicity however.
Some archaeologists suppose that people might have been in North America south of Alaska as long ago as 45,000 years. IMO this is improbable but can’t be ruled out. Evidence is emerging for the occupation of Beringia by at least 25,000 years ago, however.
A well-preserved mammoth killed and butchered, presumably by modern humans, not Neanderthals or Denisovans, excavated in 2012 at 72 degrees North on Siberia’s Yenisei Gulf has now been reliably dated to 45,000 years ago. Its excavators assumed it to be only around 30,000 years old.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/grisly-find-suggests-humans-inhabited-arctic-45000-years-ago
If people were on the Taymyr Peninsula 45,000 years ago, then there is no reason why they couldn’t have survived in Beringia, unless the short-faced bear kept them out. There might have been too few of them and too much space however for them to have gotten that far.
I mean too few people, not bears. The short-faced bear was limited to the Americas, while woolly rhinos and cave hyenas were restricted to western Beringia and beyond, ie Eurasia.