Are scientists finally going to stop pretending that climate change wiped out American mega-fauna just as the ancestors of Amerindians coincidentally arrived?
I’m betting it was the men that launched the Clovis-pointed spear at high velocity to bring down the tasty wooly mammoth. The women were likely forced to participate and hold no responsibility for the friendly animal’s extinction. They also undoubtedly bore the burden of cooking the large, unwieldy carcass…no mean trick while supervising toddlers.
I woman might even be able to do it but I don't think they would have gone on what I assume were multi day trips away from camp to find a mammoth to kill
Steve, do you think there's a chance some enterprising Indian opened the world's first woolly mammoth burger restaurant, but we just haven't found the archeological evidence yet?
The parsimonious (though not necessarily correct and complete) explanation is that pre-Clovis people didn't have both the culture (co-operative hunting) and technology (projectile weapons) to hunt megafauna. The Clovis did.
Maybe they didn’t know how? Keep in mind that none of the Clovis or pre-Clovis people had used something as basic as the wheel to save labor. Also, thousands of years later, when Europeans like Lewis and Clark first crossed the great plains, they found herds of buffalo as far as the eye could see. Life was comparatively easy still.
The huge number of buffalo in the 19th Century West appear to be the result of an ecological disruption. In places where there hasn't been one yet, the Serengeti or the La Brea Tarpits before the Indians arrived, you see a lot of biodiversity.
Interesting story, but I visited rainforests in a central American country and saw a a lot of monkeys and sloths. When I went to a part of the Amazon, I saw almost none. The former was mainly national parks, the latter apparently had indigenous tribes.
Also, don't forget that 90% of Native Americans died from disease after contact. That could potentially have contributed to bison populations being as large as they were despite the presence of hunters.
Let’s look at Africa. Africans haven’t managed to exterminate their megafauna until very recently, when they gained access to superior arms. Now they’re going gangbusters!
Yeah, it's a tough question. If it's real that people survived in the new world for thousands of years before Clovis Culture, why didn't they either explode in population or die out? How did they walk the tightrope between either fate, while apparently still getting far inland (e.g., the footprints at White Sands, New Mexico)?
The name Shane Doyle is demographically the name of every third Irish guy born in 1985.
Jerry Springer used to show the results of paternity tests. I doubt anyone will commission a show where 23andme results of Native Americans are shown live on air.
Steve Reich wrote at length about how tribes won’t let anyone near ancient Native remains. There seems to be complete taboo around the topic.
Jared Diamond made a big deal out of there being few(only one?) domesticable animals in the Western hemisphere.....Is your mama a Llama?
However, Jared neglected to mention the idea there was only one, because the the rest of the wide-eyed horses were hunted to extinction,The horse was eaten to extinction by the newly arrived Indians.
Horses vs Llamas
Eurasia boasted 13 of the 14 domesticable mammals in the world as native species. Among these was the horse.
As Diamond learns, the horse was fundamental to the farming success of Eurasian societies, providing not only food and fertilizer but also, crucially, load-bearing power and transport – transforming the productivity of the land.
The only non-Eurasian domesticable animal species in the world was the llama – native, by chance, to South America. The Inca relied on llamas for meat, wool and fertilizer – but the llama was not a load-bearing animal. Llamas can't pull a plow, nor can they transport human beings.
Eaten to extinction
The Hagerman horse was once a common sight in North America. But this species went extinct around 10,000 years ago for unknown reasons. Some scientists believe that the arrival of humans on the continent led to the extinction of the Hagerman horse, while others believe that climate change played a role. The first humans arrived in North America around 15,000 years ago, and they quickly began hunting the horses for food which has led scientists to believe it is the cause of the Hagerman horses’ demise.
I want Razib to investigate my contention that Timothy grass genetic analysis can track the spread of domesticated horses. He might not have time but at least he could propose a study.
Btw I like Razib and wish he were my neighbor. I get bored sometimes dealing with the usual stuff.
"We still aren’t sure how the ancestors of the New World Indians broke out of the strangely non-ice covered Beringia. By boat down the Alaskan panhandle? Through an inland corridor through the ice sheets?"
Probably both. Using dogs as pack animals probably works as well as boats of the time. Amundsen made it to the South Pole with dogs. Feed them fatty mammoth meat and they can go all day.
Not to rain on the Amerindian parade, but they really should have been further along by the time we showed up. They should have been able to pitch their yurts, start tossing seeds in the ground, and make the Neolithic jump. Columbus should have been haling Amerindian ships headed east to see what was over there.
Why not? A genetic bottleneck dominated by the beefcake-warrior class? But there were two whole continents in which homo sapiens spread out following the northern passage. How do you get the coordinated, focused work to slaughter and dress mega-mammals and not keep climbing the technology pyramid?
I'm always skeptical of these science history studies. I might be convinced if I read the paper. Maybe they came up with a cool undeniable 'one simple trick', but I struggle to imagine how an isotope study could tell you a person's diet was 40% mammoth.
"How hard is it to adjust to the weather getting nicer? Don’t living things in North America do it every spring?"
Not my specific subfield of bio, but I don't think the issue is individual animals adapting to nicer weather. It's more that your species gets outcompeted in its niche by other animals. Sure a mammoth could just adapt to the warmer weather, but if a large number of smaller animals eat all of its food, its reproductive numbers fall ever so slightly generation after generation until finally the last male can only breed with its highly inbred sister and all the progeny are stillborn.
It's possible that the humans were one of several environmental stressors that led to the mass extinctions over time. I know Steve is just simplifying, but I don't see some Indian eating the last mammoth, belching, and then thinking 'I wonder what ground sloth tastes like'
Your last paragraph keeps me wondering about the human history of the Americas. Shouldn't the place have been a lot more crowded by the time we got here? Or was the tribes' ethos so violent and retrograde they were too busy massacring each other to develop trade and the division of labor? It really is bizarre, and poor Jared Diamond's anodyne theses just fall apart as soon as you start poking them.
There was a book going around a few years ago that said the Americas were much more populated before the Europeans came and there was a huge, probably disease related die off after Columbus arrived. In North America new colonists were supposedly amazed by how perfect the place was for human habitation, almost as if paths had been laid and the land prepped for farming.
Because it had. I don't know if this is accepted theory these days.
South and Central America were even more populated when the Spaniards arrived. They had actual civilizations. I read that the Aztecs were actually from the great lakes region and went south to conquer and kill whoever started the civilization down there. Kind of like how nomads from central Asian kept storming into Europe. The Central Asian plains were also sparsely populated.
MesoAmerica was very densely populated in 1491, as was Peru. In Peru you can still all the disused terraces carved in the sides of mountains for growing potatoes in Inca times. It's like present day Bali, almost, except nobody bothers with them anymore.
North America was moderately densely populated according to accounts by explorers like Hernando de Soto and John Smith. Lots of villages, few cities. Then the epidemics came ...
One of my ancestors was the first white settler in 1759 on 600 acres bordered by South Buffalo Creek--in central North Carolina--so named because there were buffalo in the recent past. How big must the buffalo herds have been to maintain ample grassland back then on land which nowadays quickly reverts to hardwood and Virginia "Cedar" forest (our famous TarHeel pines are below the fall line)? If megafauna populations dropped below a certain point, would the flora have changed enough to finish off the rest?
There was a PBS program called "The New Wild" a few years ago that asserted that African nature reserves can actually support much larger herds than previously thought--big herds counterintuitively improved the grassland, not depleted it. Then there's the Keystone species concept--removal of one predator species upsets the balance and knocks out other species.
I'd like to know why people moved so far north--was wooly mammoth that tasty? The Polynesian diaspora seems even more unlikely. They must have been desperate or crazy, but at least the seawater was warm.
Very happy that prehistoric Indians ate a meat diet. Smoked mammoth and smoked elk and smoked moose were probably very delicious, much better than bran, oatmeal, lima beans and lentils.
Elk is very good, but caribou is tops. It’s like beef, except beefier. Unfortunately, the Cree Indians in Canada talked the government into shutting down the hunt to outsiders.
I've never had caribou. Elk is really good. So is deer. The Indians in Quebec thought the beef and pork raised by French settlers was low-quality meat and scoffed at it.
Not to mention -- well, to mention -- Australia, where fifty thousand years ago the first humans to arrive found harmless and tasty megafauna like Palorchestes azael, the Titan Wombat, but on the other hand were confronted by Dromornis stirtoni (nicknamed the "Demon Duck of Doom") and were themselves very much on the menu for mammallian terror mashups that included saber-toothed kangaroos.
The lectures of Ancient Civilizations of North America at Great Courses was fascinating. I didn’t realize how sophisticated some of the groups had gotten before 1492.
New World civilizations tended to be erratically sophisticated compared to Eurasian civilizations: they'd do some things really well and then miss out on other ideas. In Eurasia, good ideas tended to spread east and west so advanced civilizations were comparably advanced. Maybe it was harder for innovations to spread north and south in the New World? It's still hard to drive through Panama.
I’m betting it was the men that launched the Clovis-pointed spear at high velocity to bring down the tasty wooly mammoth. The women were likely forced to participate and hold no responsibility for the friendly animal’s extinction. They also undoubtedly bore the burden of cooking the large, unwieldy carcass…no mean trick while supervising toddlers.
To pierce mammoth one of these might have helped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower
I woman might even be able to do it but I don't think they would have gone on what I assume were multi day trips away from camp to find a mammoth to kill
Steve, do you think there's a chance some enterprising Indian opened the world's first woolly mammoth burger restaurant, but we just haven't found the archeological evidence yet?
We have evidence that F. Flintstone and B. Rubble opened up a Mammothburger restaurant with the help of a loan from Ray Krock.
That's a Kroc.
Human's arrived in North and South America 20,000 years ago. Dr. James Adovasio, among others, has found solid evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M._Adovasio
Search for pre-Clovis sites. They exist throughout the Americas.
If Clovis peoples did exterminate megafauna, we'd need to explain why pre-Clovis peoples did not for 9,000 or so years.
The parsimonious (though not necessarily correct and complete) explanation is that pre-Clovis people didn't have both the culture (co-operative hunting) and technology (projectile weapons) to hunt megafauna. The Clovis did.
Maybe they didn’t know how? Keep in mind that none of the Clovis or pre-Clovis people had used something as basic as the wheel to save labor. Also, thousands of years later, when Europeans like Lewis and Clark first crossed the great plains, they found herds of buffalo as far as the eye could see. Life was comparatively easy still.
The huge number of buffalo in the 19th Century West appear to be the result of an ecological disruption. In places where there hasn't been one yet, the Serengeti or the La Brea Tarpits before the Indians arrived, you see a lot of biodiversity.
Interesting story, but I visited rainforests in a central American country and saw a a lot of monkeys and sloths. When I went to a part of the Amazon, I saw almost none. The former was mainly national parks, the latter apparently had indigenous tribes.
Also, don't forget that 90% of Native Americans died from disease after contact. That could potentially have contributed to bison populations being as large as they were despite the presence of hunters.
Let’s look at Africa. Africans haven’t managed to exterminate their megafauna until very recently, when they gained access to superior arms. Now they’re going gangbusters!
Yeah, it's a tough question. If it's real that people survived in the new world for thousands of years before Clovis Culture, why didn't they either explode in population or die out? How did they walk the tightrope between either fate, while apparently still getting far inland (e.g., the footprints at White Sands, New Mexico)?
The Neanderthals survived for tens of thousands of years without really exploding in population or dying out.
There's real controversy surrounding White Sands. It's not settled at all.
Genetic evidence disagrees: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1501385
Thanks for the link!
Anytime is a good time to make a hungry, hungry hippo reference :)
It really pulled together the post.
“Shane Doyle, a member of the Crow Tribe”
The name Shane Doyle is demographically the name of every third Irish guy born in 1985.
Jerry Springer used to show the results of paternity tests. I doubt anyone will commission a show where 23andme results of Native Americans are shown live on air.
Steve Reich wrote at length about how tribes won’t let anyone near ancient Native remains. There seems to be complete taboo around the topic.
Shane Doyle played bass for The Pogues, right?
Jared Diamond made a big deal out of there being few(only one?) domesticable animals in the Western hemisphere.....Is your mama a Llama?
However, Jared neglected to mention the idea there was only one, because the the rest of the wide-eyed horses were hunted to extinction,The horse was eaten to extinction by the newly arrived Indians.
Horses vs Llamas
Eurasia boasted 13 of the 14 domesticable mammals in the world as native species. Among these was the horse.
As Diamond learns, the horse was fundamental to the farming success of Eurasian societies, providing not only food and fertilizer but also, crucially, load-bearing power and transport – transforming the productivity of the land.
The only non-Eurasian domesticable animal species in the world was the llama – native, by chance, to South America. The Inca relied on llamas for meat, wool and fertilizer – but the llama was not a load-bearing animal. Llamas can't pull a plow, nor can they transport human beings.
Eaten to extinction
The Hagerman horse was once a common sight in North America. But this species went extinct around 10,000 years ago for unknown reasons. Some scientists believe that the arrival of humans on the continent led to the extinction of the Hagerman horse, while others believe that climate change played a role. The first humans arrived in North America around 15,000 years ago, and they quickly began hunting the horses for food which has led scientists to believe it is the cause of the Hagerman horses’ demise.
https://horseracingsense.com/are-horses-native-to-north-america/
Razib Khan has a new substack post on all the good things horses did for humans.
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/but-then-i-realized-horses-are-just
I want Razib to investigate my contention that Timothy grass genetic analysis can track the spread of domesticated horses. He might not have time but at least he could propose a study.
Btw I like Razib and wish he were my neighbor. I get bored sometimes dealing with the usual stuff.
"We still aren’t sure how the ancestors of the New World Indians broke out of the strangely non-ice covered Beringia. By boat down the Alaskan panhandle? Through an inland corridor through the ice sheets?"
Probably both. Using dogs as pack animals probably works as well as boats of the time. Amundsen made it to the South Pole with dogs. Feed them fatty mammoth meat and they can go all day.
Too bad Captain Scott didn't get your advice.
But were there mammoths to eat out on the ice sheets between Alaska and about the 49th parallel?
At some point yes. Around 13-14k years before present IIRC. The Cordilleran ice sheet shrank pretty fast.
The coastal fish eaters probably came first, which is why the megafauna didn't go extinct with the first wave of settlers.
Wait, the climate ... changed?
Not to rain on the Amerindian parade, but they really should have been further along by the time we showed up. They should have been able to pitch their yurts, start tossing seeds in the ground, and make the Neolithic jump. Columbus should have been haling Amerindian ships headed east to see what was over there.
Why not? A genetic bottleneck dominated by the beefcake-warrior class? But there were two whole continents in which homo sapiens spread out following the northern passage. How do you get the coordinated, focused work to slaughter and dress mega-mammals and not keep climbing the technology pyramid?
Further south, in Mexico and Peru, Amerindians had spectacular cities. What's now Mexico City was a huge civil engineering feat by 1491.
Cities would occasionally emerge in what's now the U.S., but didn't seem to become permanent. It's curious.
I'm always skeptical of these science history studies. I might be convinced if I read the paper. Maybe they came up with a cool undeniable 'one simple trick', but I struggle to imagine how an isotope study could tell you a person's diet was 40% mammoth.
"How hard is it to adjust to the weather getting nicer? Don’t living things in North America do it every spring?"
Not my specific subfield of bio, but I don't think the issue is individual animals adapting to nicer weather. It's more that your species gets outcompeted in its niche by other animals. Sure a mammoth could just adapt to the warmer weather, but if a large number of smaller animals eat all of its food, its reproductive numbers fall ever so slightly generation after generation until finally the last male can only breed with its highly inbred sister and all the progeny are stillborn.
It's possible that the humans were one of several environmental stressors that led to the mass extinctions over time. I know Steve is just simplifying, but I don't see some Indian eating the last mammoth, belching, and then thinking 'I wonder what ground sloth tastes like'
Your last paragraph keeps me wondering about the human history of the Americas. Shouldn't the place have been a lot more crowded by the time we got here? Or was the tribes' ethos so violent and retrograde they were too busy massacring each other to develop trade and the division of labor? It really is bizarre, and poor Jared Diamond's anodyne theses just fall apart as soon as you start poking them.
There was a book going around a few years ago that said the Americas were much more populated before the Europeans came and there was a huge, probably disease related die off after Columbus arrived. In North America new colonists were supposedly amazed by how perfect the place was for human habitation, almost as if paths had been laid and the land prepped for farming.
Because it had. I don't know if this is accepted theory these days.
South and Central America were even more populated when the Spaniards arrived. They had actual civilizations. I read that the Aztecs were actually from the great lakes region and went south to conquer and kill whoever started the civilization down there. Kind of like how nomads from central Asian kept storming into Europe. The Central Asian plains were also sparsely populated.
1491 and 1493 by Charles C. Mann are highly informative.
MesoAmerica was very densely populated in 1491, as was Peru. In Peru you can still all the disused terraces carved in the sides of mountains for growing potatoes in Inca times. It's like present day Bali, almost, except nobody bothers with them anymore.
North America was moderately densely populated according to accounts by explorers like Hernando de Soto and John Smith. Lots of villages, few cities. Then the epidemics came ...
One of my ancestors was the first white settler in 1759 on 600 acres bordered by South Buffalo Creek--in central North Carolina--so named because there were buffalo in the recent past. How big must the buffalo herds have been to maintain ample grassland back then on land which nowadays quickly reverts to hardwood and Virginia "Cedar" forest (our famous TarHeel pines are below the fall line)? If megafauna populations dropped below a certain point, would the flora have changed enough to finish off the rest?
There was a PBS program called "The New Wild" a few years ago that asserted that African nature reserves can actually support much larger herds than previously thought--big herds counterintuitively improved the grassland, not depleted it. Then there's the Keystone species concept--removal of one predator species upsets the balance and knocks out other species.
I'd like to know why people moved so far north--was wooly mammoth that tasty? The Polynesian diaspora seems even more unlikely. They must have been desperate or crazy, but at least the seawater was warm.
Very happy that prehistoric Indians ate a meat diet. Smoked mammoth and smoked elk and smoked moose were probably very delicious, much better than bran, oatmeal, lima beans and lentils.
Elk is very good, but caribou is tops. It’s like beef, except beefier. Unfortunately, the Cree Indians in Canada talked the government into shutting down the hunt to outsiders.
I've never had caribou. Elk is really good. So is deer. The Indians in Quebec thought the beef and pork raised by French settlers was low-quality meat and scoffed at it.
I can well believe it. Northern Quebec is where I used to hunt caribou. A lot of the guides were Cree; the tribe cost them their livelihood.
Did they have salt?
Not to mention -- well, to mention -- Australia, where fifty thousand years ago the first humans to arrive found harmless and tasty megafauna like Palorchestes azael, the Titan Wombat, but on the other hand were confronted by Dromornis stirtoni (nicknamed the "Demon Duck of Doom") and were themselves very much on the menu for mammallian terror mashups that included saber-toothed kangaroos.
The lectures of Ancient Civilizations of North America at Great Courses was fascinating. I didn’t realize how sophisticated some of the groups had gotten before 1492.
New World civilizations tended to be erratically sophisticated compared to Eurasian civilizations: they'd do some things really well and then miss out on other ideas. In Eurasia, good ideas tended to spread east and west so advanced civilizations were comparably advanced. Maybe it was harder for innovations to spread north and south in the New World? It's still hard to drive through Panama.
Elizabeth Weiss and James Springer have written about how wokeism is strangling scientific research into Native American archaeology:
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/34/2/repatriation-and-the-threat-to-objective-knowledge
https://quillette.com/2021/06/13/why-is-the-society-for-american-archaeology-promoting-indigenous-creationism/