TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY
- The study shows that humans always hunted the largest available animals until they became exceedingly rare or extinct, and then went on to target the next-largest. When only small animals remained in their environment, humans began to domesticate animals and developed agriculture.
- The researchers hypothesize that technological advancements throughout human evolution were driven by the need to hunt progressively smaller and faster animals.
- The researchers: “The study suggests that ever since the advent of humankind, humans have always ravaged their natural environment, but also found solutions for the problems they created. Damage to the environment, however, was often irreversible”.
A groundbreaking study by researchers from Tel Aviv University tracks the development of early humans’ hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years – as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.
In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size – improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.
The study was conducted by Prof. Ran Barkai and Dr. Miki Ben-Dor of the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Prof. Shai Meiri of the School of Zoology and Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, and Jacob Dembitzer, a research student of Prof. Barkai and Prof. Meiri, who led the project. The paper was published in the prestigious scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
The study, unprecedented in both scope and timespan, presents a comprehensive analysis of data on animal bones discovered at dozens of prehistoric sites in and around Israel. Findings indicate a continual decline in the size of game hunted by humans as their main food source – from giant elephants 1-1.5 million years ago down to gazelles 10,000 years ago. According to the researchers, these findings paint an illuminating picture of the interaction between humans and the animals around them over the last 1.5 million years.
Prof. Barkai notes two major issues presently addressed by prehistorians worldwide: What caused the mass extinction of large animals over the past hundreds of thousands of years – overhunting by humans or perhaps recurring climate changes? And what were the driving forces behind great changes in humankind – both physical and cultural – throughout its evolution?
Prof. Barkai: “In light of previous studies, our team proposed an original hypothesis that links the two questions: We think that large animals went extinct due to overhunting by humans, and that the change in diet and the need to hunt progressively smaller animals may have propelled the changes in humankind. In this study we tested our hypotheses in light of data from excavations in the Southern Levant covering several human species over a period of 1.5 million years.”
Jacob Dembitzer adds: “We considered the Southern Levant (Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Southwest Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) to be an ‘archaeological laboratory’ due to the density and continuity of prehistoric findings covering such a long period of time over a relatively small area – a unique database unavailable anywhere else in the world. Excavations, which began 150 years ago, have produced evidence for the presence of humans, beginning with Homo erectus who arrived 1.5 million years ago, through the neandertals who lived here from an unknown time until they disappeared about 45,000 years ago, to modern humans (namely, ourselves) who came from Africa in several waves, starting around 180,000 years ago.”
The researchers collected all data available in the literature on animal bones found at prehistoric sites in the Southern Levant, mostly in Israel. These excavations, conducted from 1932 until today, provide a unique sequence of findings from different types of humans over a period of 1.5 million years. With some sites comprising several stratigraphic layers, sometimes thousands of years apart, the study covered a total of 133 layers from 58 prehistoric sites, in which thousands of bones belonging to 83 animal species had been identified. Based on these remains, the researchers calculated the weighted mean size of the animals in each layer at every site.
Prof. Meiri: “Our study tracked changes at a much higher resolution over a considerably longer period of time compared to previous research. The results were illuminating: we found a continual, and very significant, decline in the size of animals hunted by humans over 1.5 million years. For example, a third of the bones left behind by Homo erectus at sites dated to about a million years ago, belonged to elephants that weighed up to 13 tons (more than twice the weight of the modern African elephant) and provided humans with 90% of their food. The mean weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was 3 tons, and elephant bones were found at nearly all sites up to 500,000 years ago.
“Starting about 400,000 years ago, the humans who lived in our region – early ancestors of the Neandertals and Homo sapiens, appear to have hunted mainly deer, along with some larger animals weighing almost a ton, such as wild cattle and horses. Finally, in sites inhabited by modern humans, from about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70% of the bones belong to gazelles – an animal that weighs no more than 20-30kg. Other remains found at these later sites came mostly from fallow deer (about 20%), as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles.”
Jacob Dembitzer: “Our next question was: What caused the disappearance of the large animals? A widely accepted theory attributes the extinction of large species to climate changes through the ages. To test this, we collected climatic and environmental data for the entire period, covering more than a dozen cycles of glacial and interglacial periods. This data included temperatures based on levels of the oxygen 18 isotope, and rainfall and vegetation evidenced by values of carbon 13 from the local Soreq Cave. A range of statistical analyses correlating between animal size and climate, precipitation, and environment, revealed that climate, and climate change, had little, if any, impact on animal extinction.”
Dr. Ben-Dor: “Our findings enable us to propose a fascinating hypothesis on the development of humankind: humans always preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, until these became very rare or extinct, forcing the prehistoric hunters to seek the next in size. As a result, to obtain the same amount of food, every human species appearing in the Southern Levant was compelled to hunt smaller animals than its predecessor, and consequently had to develop more advanced and effective technologies. Thus, for example, while spears were sufficient for Homo erectus to kill elephants at close range, modern humans developed the bow and arrow to kill fast-running gazelles from a distance.”
Prof. Barkai concludes: “We believe that our model is relevant to human cultures everywhere. Moreover, for the first time, we argue that the driving force behind the constant improvement in human technology is the continual decline in the size of game. Ultimately, it may well be that 10,000 years ago in the Southern Levant, animals became too small or too rare to provide humans with sufficient food, and this could be related to the advent of agriculture. In addition, we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans – who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting. We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created – from the bow and arrow to the agricultural revolution. The environment, however, always paid a devastating price.”
Link to the article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379121005230?dgcid=author
JOURNAL
Quaternary Science Reviews
DOI
10.1016/j.quascirev.2021.107316
ARTICLE TITLE
Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distribution
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
15-Dec-2021
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Hunters today are the greatest conservationists on the planet. No single group of humans invests more in animals and their habitat than hunters. Habitat destruction is what leads to extinction. Hunters don’t destroy habitat, they try to conserve it.
What modern hunters do and those of 1.5 million to 5000 years ago are very different. Even to those of 100 years ago.
The best way for animals to survive these days is to be tasty to humans
“best way for animals to survive these days is to be tasty to humans”
And not only these days.
So the Aurochs is extinct.
Except that all our domesticated cattle (yum, yum) are derived from Aurochs. There are even folks trying to re-create Aurochs by careful breeding from existing cattle.
Just goes to show people are totally different to any species they hunted. And as for ravaging the environment – look at the sheer number of farm animals today.
Darwinian modelling using animal predator-prey memes, just cannot account for human ingenuity including fire, modular spear slings, skilled organization, agriculture, domestication, breeding, none of which are ¨forced¨ – see the number of times they use that. (Reminiscent of IPCC Climate Forcing).
Obviously written by people that have NEVER HUNTED. I’ve hunted all my live, it’s very difficult even with modern rifles. You would not choose game that can kill you if anything else is available. As far as game not being used to humans, they learn VERY FAST. Especially herd animals. I bought 80 acres and did not hunt it for 7 years. The deer became very tame on my property even thou they were hunted on all four sides of my property. The 8th year I finally saw a buck large enough to want to take, and that was that…. I didn’t see a deer for a month, and was treated like a threat for the next two years. All it took was killing ONE of them….
I don’t think it was humans but rather natural disasters that drove global extinctions. Why do so many want to blame humans? AKA Global Warming
Because that’s where the evidence leads.
They have to have some way to generate a guilt trip. If they don’t have that, the ecohippies have nothing.
Try not to take it personally. It wasn’t you that extincted the mammoths. It was your 1,000 times great grandfather.
Where did the Clovis people go at the Start of the YD?
50% of all mammals above 100 lbs go extinct.
https://cosmictusk.com/category/younger-dryas-impact-evidence/
Clovis culture lasted long after the start of the YD. As the largest game was wiped out, their culture changed.
Megafauna went extinct before, during and after the YD. Why did megafauna survive in the Caribbean until the arrival on those islands of boat people thousands of years later, if a supposed impact wiped out their kin in Florida, Mexico, Central and South America?
There is no valid evidence of an impact at the YD, and all the evidence in the world that its cause was the same as Heinrich Events, the Older and Middle Dryases and the 8.2 Ka cold snap, ie freshwater pulses into the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Clovis people migrated to South America and then vanished about 9,000 years ago…
https://www.hhmi.org/news/clovis-people-spread-central-and-south-america-then-vanished
Also going on when they went extinct is the biggest change in the climate in 250,000 years.
Climate Change!!!!!!!!! Whoo whooo! Everybody be SCARED, very SCARED!!!
No it wasn’t. Not even close.
The Eemian Interglacial was hotter and lasted longer than the Holocene so far.
I have found obsidian bird-points around Meteor Crater. Why would the Indians have hunted birds when there were still bison, elk, deer, bear, mountain lions, wolves, javalina(?), coyotes, foxes, etc.? I think an intelligent species (some actually consider humans to be intelligent) would take advantage of any and all game available, and consider the personal risk when given a choice between two opportunities.
Also, smaller game means a solitary hunter can carry the animal back to camp, while a mammoth would require the camp to move to the kill site. Interestingly, evidence seems to suggest that in mass killings at Buffalo Jumps, after the basic needs were met for hides and other body parts, primarily tongues were removed for food. A mammoth was so huge that there was a likelihood of the meat spoiling before it could all be consumed. Knowing that, a tribe might select for less dangerous animals that could be consumed before it spoiled.
I think that these researchers are over-generalizing.
Indians hunted a variety of game. They burned to maintain grasslands, to provide fodder for elk and because it’s harder to hunt deer and moose in the woods than elk in the open. Or the odd bison calf.
The key word is hypothesize. An invitation to look at it.
Partly true, possibly. There are many counter arguments to be made.
I’m increasingly persuaded by some of the Younger Dryas cosmic-impact evidence. Sudden climate change including massive floods from impacts on the ice sheets in North America in particular.
If you hunt around, there are several excellent discussions of this on Youtube (other video sharing programs are available. Youtube just hasn’t got round to censoring these ones yet).
They could be right, but it fits a bit too neatly into the paradigm of “man the environment wrecker”, so you have confirmation bias at work, and I am skeptical.
Modern hunter/gatherer/nomads had dogs…the dogs had fleas…the fleas carried disease. Disease is a much more like cause of the demise of these large mammals. Who in their right mind wants to get hurt badly trying to kill a mammoth with a pointy stick when you could catch a fish, snare a rabbit, gather birds eggs or berries ?
Because mammoths provide much more meat, plus hide, tusks, bone, fat and other resources. Baby mammoths would have been easy to k!ll, and adults were stampeded over cliffs, or into canyon cul-de-sacs, as shown by archaeological sites.
Why do you suppose that the Pleistocene-Holocene megafaunal extinctions all followed the arrival of humans on the affected continents and islands? And as later happened at sea?
Besides which, as noted above, all Australian megafaunal etinctions happened before dogs got there, as did many of those in Eurasia.
Please state which flea-borne diseases you imagine wiped out giant lizards and marsupials in Oz and even larger proboscideans in Eurasia and the Americas. Thanks!
There is an article on “Mammoth Appetites” in the Jan-Feb American Scientist. The Clovis Points they show don’t look very comparable to big caliber repeating guns sometimes shot from trains going through herds. One might understand that they could run them off a cliff, certainly get the naive, but the article raises the concept of the importance of “flavor” for preferred prey species. They understood that the largest, less productive go first, but add another hypothesis making it more complicated.
Clone those puppies so we can hunt them again. Life liberty and the freedom to eat meat!
The only clear message in the article is that humans are bad and need to be controlled and this betrays the purpose of this article.
Continuous model-output BS production…
Large animals existed in the Sahara when it supported wildlife.Desertification did for them. Wildlife moved to where the vegetation and water could support them. Humans followed the herds.
If this theory is true, how many humans were trampled to death or gored by the tusks of giant elephants larger than today’s elephants? Elephants tend to roam in herds, and the larger males tend to defend smaller elephants (females or calves) when they are attacked.
Trying to kill an elephant with spears is a risky endeavor, and how many spears must be thrown at an elephant before one strikes a fatal blow, and meanwhile an angry elephant could trample the spear-throwers whose spears only slightly wounded the elephant.
This theory seems rather far-fetched, to say the least. It seems like the researchers are trying to prove that humans always destroy their environment.
Regarding elephants, the people of India had a better idea–be friendly to a young elephant, then train it to do work too heavy for people.
Elephant herds are matriarchal.
If you look at the hunter-gather world. The hunter/gather cultures took and still take advantage of local conditions. In the deep forests and jungles plenty is small. In the vast grasslands and prairies plenty is big.
Agriculture for the common man was something he could manage alone, and with his family on his family plot. Smaller animals fit the bill. It also promoted more free time and this led to more art, more tools, more technology to resolve different problems.
As for the disappearance of large animals. The answer is in the question. Large animals. When they go extinct its very noticeable. When one of the myriad of small animals have gone extinct, it remains something a study would be needed to inform the population of at any time. Unless its going extinct impacted local conditions as some do as a food source for another larger carnivorous animals and those carnivores have to move away altering the game diversity once again. Hunter-gather societies have always been in tune with such changes in their environments.
I feel this study is trying too hard to put the small shoe of man’s preference on the very large foot of nature in motion.
Farmers didn’t give up big game hunting. It’s just that the biggest game was extinct.
What constitutes big game hunting is analogist to what is termed a forest. Depends on the local condition.
Pre-agriculture hunting was a ‘collective’ tribal effort. It took all the men and sometimes the women to bring down the large mammals. The size of the game, the amount of food, made the intense effort worth it all. Even the wounding or possible death of its members.
Agriculture brought game out of the sphere of necessity, away from a tribal effort and into that of an adjunct to farmed food and ‘sport’. The tradition became a season, not a daily demand.
The idea that hunting-gathering man is behind the extinction of large species is so ridiculous on its face it makes such postulations a casualty of dramatic hyperbole in lieu of any understanding of what nature herself has wrought over time.
The concept is a ridiculous as the suggestion that the loss of ‘big game’ drove hunter-gather man into the arms of agriculture. It excludes the act of hunter-gather man envisioning a better, easier, less deadly way to put food on the table, clothes on their backs, and often roofs on their huts. Of course, like nonsense assumptions are written today by people who don’t have a clue where their own food comes from. Pity.
It’s not ridiculous. The evidence shows that it’s a fact.
No, the evidence shows a correlation. The full picture disproves direct causation. Sorry. But you do you.
No idea what evidence you imagine exists, but the fact is that megafauna were wiped out by humans.
In Eurasia, then Australia, then the Americas. It’s an open and shut case.
The most important finding is that we humans were hypercarnivores and not general omnivores for all of this time. This is what the real lesson of this study is. The study is about 25 lines of evidence that show that we were hypercarnivores, not general omnivores, and that has huge implications for our diet. We are not carbohydrate eaters and the fact that we have had to eat plants when we are not adapted to them is the major cause of obesity on the planet.
N15 istopes increase up the food chain and not long ago our N15 levels were higher than those of canines and hyenas. We don’t have the morphology of omnivores, much less herbivores like all of the other apes. Our acidity levels of our stomachs compare with scavengers, which is what we needed when we killed large animals and needed to feed on them for days or weeks.
Please read the 25 lines of evidence they discuss because it is important to your health.
There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. We can live fine on meat only. I have been basically a canivore for a year and half and all of my labs are far better than they used to be. My BMI has gone from 32 in 2016 to 26 today. I try to eat less than 20 grams of carbs a day.
The diet of our ancestors was the inverse of the pyramid we have been told to eat. Our ancestors ate the largest animals because they had the most fat which was saturated. They only ate plants if they were starving.
Our livers can turn animal proteins into all the sugar we need. Once we started eating plants our mouths determined our blood sugar levels, not our livers.
Obesity has been the number one factor for a bad outcome with Covid across all ages and races and countries. And obesity is caused by insulin resistance which is caused by too much carbohydrate consumption.
The authors wrote this paper for this reason and not to verify our extinction of animals or our deleterious effect on the environment. They wrote it for our health.
One species goes extinct approximately every five minutes.
Nowhere is it written that all species must last forever. They time out. Nature isn’t a constant. Animals that don’t have a diverse diet and are dependent on a single grass or other animal, any changes there brings them to ruin.
There is no environmental interspecies homeostasis.
During the 1930’s dust bowl years, prairie grasses were replaced by cooler climate grasses. Grass so foreign it’s boggled science. The ecology changed. 135,000 square miles of the south-central U.S changed. The (native) animal population changed.
After the decade-long Dust Bowl drought, remnants of the drought’s impact on the plant and animal communities were evident for 20 years. In 2021 it is still being studied.
The ecology changed. Animal species moved out and into this change bringing further change. Ecology happens. It’s a much bigger story than the authors of this article above would have us believe.
I call b.s. on this entire pap. The data back to the middle of the Pleistocene on hunting has to be 90% guesswork and little if any data. That is one point.
Secondly, humand were in small hunter-gatherer nomadic groups, and killing a mammoth, for example would provide several tons of meat – 90% of which meat they couldn’t eat before it spoiled, and even if dried, they couldn’t carry it with with them.
Paul Martin’s Overkill Theory about Clovis Man entering the N American continent and within 350 years killing not only all mammoths and mastodons, but also 30+ other megafauna on a contentent of about 5,000,000 sq miles (not counting the Laurentian Ice Sheet). His crap guesswork assumption-based science was wrong for the same reasons. Clovis Man was 90% east of the Mississippi River, so what was a hunting group near Clovis, NM, at Blackwater Draw doing hunting mammoths 2,000 miles from home? Gonna do takeout? None of this makes any sense and is completely out of proportion to what the people could DO with tons of meat at a time.
That wasted meat with every kill rarely happened, and these people swallowed Martin’s terrible science, hook line and sinker.
Hunter-gatherers were subsistence hunters. Their population was too small, too spread out and inadequate for killing mammoths and mastodons and American Sloths and American Camels and the American Horse. Hunting smaller game was their game. Regardless what you read in the Martin-friendly journals.
Oh, and Meltzer wrote two papers before 2000 that refuted Martin’s theory – which should never have been called anything more than a hypothesis. But he published it at the start of a period of humans beating their breasts and saying we were a cancer on the Earth (which han’t stopped), and aren’t we all terrible? Overkill and global warming both fit into that self-flagellating meme.
Mr. Garcia, concise summary. Consider the saber tooth cat: The most dangerous animal (short nosed cave bear is another one), why on Earth hunt the most dangerous animal?
It is a conceit of trophy hunters to believe survival hunters would go after the most dangerous animals when other less dangerous animals were in abundance.
Consider, only Africa, today, has mega-fauna (sans, Asia elephant, which is smaller): perhaps that is because the African continent was least subjected to catastrophic geologic action around 12,000 years ago.
There is evidence in the geologic record of great change in that time span.
But hey, I wasn’t there.
A survival way of life employs & weighs risk-benefit analysis: saber tooth cats & short nosed cave bears are high risk with average rewards.
(Losing just two male hunters could doom a small hunter-gatherer group.)
As an aside, human population density on the North American continent, in the time frame in question, has not been demonstrated to be enough to account for an extinction of all mega-fauna in a relatively short duration of time.
Obviously, people didn’t much hunt other top carnivores. They wiped out the megafauna upon which those predators depended.
It happened at different times and to differing extents in Africa, Eurasia, Australia, the Americas, Madagascar, NZ and the rest of Polynesia and other remote oceanic islands, but always the same story. Humans came, saw and wiped out.
Seems to me regular bison & elk and others could sustain them.
A baby elephant… er, a baby woolly mammoth, once in a while (as a hunter-gatherer triumph??) doesn’t seem likely to cause extinction.
No evidence of human density at all.
No, the assumptions you make are not demonstrated in the record