Re: Death of Megafauna

In sci.archaeology message
news:43c102b0$0$24538$dbd4b001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx by "Peter Alaca"
<P.Alaca@xxxxxx> . . . :

> Uwe Müller wrote: dpqhuo$3v7$2@xxxxxxxxx,
>
>> "prd" <X_header@xxxxxxxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
>> news:SIQvf.429187$zb5.82601@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> .
>>> In sci.archaeology message news:dpo9or$2pn$1@xxxxxxxxx by
>>> "Uwe Müller" <uwemueller@xxxxxxxxxx> . . . :
>>>
>>>>> If the composite blades that were on display in Japan are
>>>>> the similar to those in the the americas, I wonder what else
>>>>> they might have been hunting. Your not killing bambi with a
>>>>> blade 7 or 8 inches long and 3 or 4 inches wide. I Japan
>>>>> they did find mammoth bones in the same regions as the
>>>>> microblades that made the composites.
>>>>
>>>> It reminds of daggers made from flint, about the same size,
>>>> very thin and very pretty. But nothing you would ever like to
>>>> have to use to defend yourself with against some bad tempered
>>>> Aurochs etc. Or of early bronze age bronze hilted daggers
>>>> (Vollgriffdolche), very beautifull weapons, but the only
>>>> signs of wear ever discovered were from cutting (not
>>>> stabbing), maybe used for cutting the throats of sacrificial
>>>> animals.
>>>
>>> Theres no doubt that these composite could have been used for
>>> ceremonies. However I thing for sacrifies weapons are
>>> typically with very sharp and delicate edges. These composite
>>> microblade assemblages appear really designed to be thrown and
>>> a little blood letting, as the animal tries to dislodge them
>>> tearing more flesh, possibly causing infection to set in.
>>>
>>>>> Obviously not, but that is a not a logical basis for
>>>>> concluding hunting for opportunity.
>>>>
>>>> But there are certain periods were hunting seemed to be
>>>> centered on big game, mammoths, and other times, were the
>>>> preferred game was for instance reindeer. The mammoth in the
>>>> Old World survived the mammoth hunters, and the reindeer
>>>> survived the reindeer hunters. I wonder why the mammoth
>>>> should then have been hunted to extinction by hunters that
>>>> did not specialise to prey on a certain species anymore, that
>>>> were hunting non-migrating animals in a certain area.
>>>
>>> I would answer that during the later period culture changed,
>>> the weapons improved, and the decline in megafauna falls the
>>> appearance of these new technology cultures.
>>
>> Migratory animals need a vast territory to themselves, if
>> non-migratory animals start to feed all year round on what is
>> supposed to be the winter feeding grounds of lets say mammoth,
>> what can mammoth do but starve?
>> With the warming of temperatures all kinds of small insects and
>> microorganism might multiply, driving animals away, that were
>> not used to them.
>> Rising temperature may have blocked migratory passages, by
>> making rivers and bogs ice free, or not frozen deep enough, to
>> carry the weight any more. The rising humidity may wel have
>> played an in important part.
>> Humans like other predators were dangerous to very young and
>> very old animals, to sick and wounded ones. They took mammoth
>> that got trapped in a bog, but I know of no hunting pits with
>> remains of trapped mammoth in them, no large killing sites with
>> dozens of dead mammoth, ....
>>
>> Could a couple of hundred or even thousand palaeolithic hunters
>> hunt mammoth to extinction in a time were mammoth bones a
>> scarce in human settlements? Maybe, even though not very
>> likely. But who would have hunted for the rest of the humans,
>> those that could not roam the steppes just for the killing? We
>> know, that when whole tribes specialised in hunting mammoth,
>> they did not exterminate them.
>>
>> On the whole, it seems rather unlikely, that humans were the
>> single cause for the extinction. And as you seem not to be able
>> to point at killing sites, where more than single animals had
>> been taken, there is no evidence for that scenario. There is
>> just a coincidence, a parallel in time.
>>
>> I live at the border of an old glaciation age river, the
>> Warschau-Berlin-Urstromtal. I have been told, that about any
>> piece of higher elevated ground shows traces of some
>> palaeolithic hunters camp. Any migrating herd had to pass
>> through this river valley and would have been hunted. There are
>> single-mammoth kill sites, but lots more with horses, reindeer
>> etc.
>>
>> At the time, when according to your scenario they should have
>> specialised in following mammoth all year round, hunting thm to
>> extermination, they settled down to at least semi-sedentary
>> living styles, hunting deer and boar and fishing, preying only
>> on migrating herds when they passed through the region. AFAIK
>> there is nothing to indicate late paleaolithic hunters had the
>> abilities or the the need to exterminate mammoth, the wooly
>> rhinos, giant stag, smilodon, whatever.
>>
>> Maybe if they had had a convenient railroad they might have
>> considered.
>>
>>>
>>>>>> The pleistocene overkill hypothesis is a dead issue.
>>>>>> Whatever caused the extinction of ice age megafauna, it
>>>>>> wasn't human hunting.
>>>>>
>>>>> Bologne. The types of weapons created were not designed for
>>>>> small swift game but for large easy targets. It may be true
>>>>> that there is a current swing in the literature for other
>>>>> causes, I am confident it will swing back again, these blips
>>>>> in thinking always occur, as soon as some of the critiques
>>>>> are addressed it will once again point the finger at humans.
>>>>
>>>> That is certainly true, but it is equally true, that after
>>>> swinging back to human hunting as a main reason, it will
>>>> certainly swing back to non-human causes again. So the data
>>>> is simply inconclusive. Mass hunting or slaughtering of
>>>> horses, on a scale that has never been done on the big
>>>> animals, has not led to the extinction of horses.
>>>
>>> Horses are dually functional, as with pachyderms. If you look
>>> at the elaphids as a group, they did not go extinct, the asian
>>> elephants was domesticated, the Aroch did not go exint, the
>>> oxen is its descendant. But you can look at the variety of
>>> horses or pachyderms in one place and discern that, for
>>> example, before the horse was introduced in the new world, it
>>> also went extinct in the New World. In fact the wild
>>> population from which horses were derived is at risk of going
>>> extinct (if in fact that is the same population). The buffulo
>>> almost went extinct, and was replaced by cattle, the
>>> technology that made it possible was the rifle. The wolf has
>>> gone extinct in many areas and certain varities are extinct,
>>> one of the key issues was trapping, trap styles, and rifles.
>>
>> But neither rifles, iron traps, railroads to carry supplies nor
>> a giant population overhang existed in the palaeolithic, the
>> brown bear, wolf and other predators survived, the cave bear
>> and the smilodon did not. Wisent, (old world bisons), Aurochs,
>> Horses, Antelopes, Reindeer and many others survived, the giant
>> stag, wooly Mammoth and wooly Rhinos did not.
>>
>>> There are many other animals in the New
>>> World that disappeared, the giant sloths, etc, where the
>>> introduction of humans might be the cause and there ease of
>>> kill, but consider that humans may have coexisted with sloths
>>> for 1000s of years until a new style of hunter appears.
>>
>> A number of other animals and plants disappeared as well,
>> without anybody wanting to blame human hunters for it.
>>>
>>>> Why not just say, that there is no
>>>> conclusive evidence for a single cause extinction scenario?
>>>
>>> You can't blame every late pliestocene/holocene extinction on
>>> humans, but humans are complicit in almost all of the
>>> megafauna extinctions.
>>
>> If you insist on phrasing that as a statement, there should be
>> at least some proof for it. If you phrase it as a possible
>> reason for the exterminations, we could argue if they had the
>> means to do so (I would be sceptical about that, but wouldn't
>> be able to provide evidence against that).
>>
>
>
> There is much of interest to read in the abstracts of
> the 3rd International Mammoth Conference (2003)
> http://www.yukonmuseums.ca/mammoth/progabst.htm
>
Thanks

POST ? 30,000 BP MAMMOTH DISTRIBUTION IN NORTH AMERICA (L)

Larry D. AGENBROAD

"A continent-wide record of mammoth distribution and 14C chronology
provides an alternative scenario for the last 30,000 years. In
particular, the post-glacial interval of 15,000-10,000 BP has the
most wide-spread mammoth distribution of any 5,000 year interval.
"

IOW at the time when I believe the first wave of immigrants grew and
temporally equillibrated (16kya to 12kya) the Mammoth population was
growing. However when the new migrants begin to equilibrate the
Mammoth begins to decline.

"
THE NORTH OF EASTERN SIBERIA: REFUGE OF THE MAMMOTH FAUNA IN THE
HOLOCENE (L)

Gennady BOESKOROV

The Mammoth Museum of the Institute of Applied Ecology of the Academy
of Sciences of The Sakha Republic (Yakutia), 35 Lenin Av., Yakutsk,
677007

The global climate changes at the end of the Pleistocene led to
extinction in the huge area of Northern Eurasia of the typical
representatives of the Mammoth fauna: mammoth, woolly rhinoceros,
wild horse, bison, muskox, cave lion, etc. Undoubtedly the Mammoth
fauna underwent strong pressure from Upper Paleolithic Man, whose
hunting activity could have played the main role in decreasing the
numbers of mammoths and other representatives of the megafauna.
Archaeological data testify that the typical representatives of the
Mammoth fauna were hunted only until the end of the Pleistocene.
Their bone remains are usually not found in the settlements of
Mesolithic Man. Formerly it was supposed that the megafauna of the
"Mammoth complex" was extinct by the beginning of the Holocene.
Nevertheless the latest data testify that the global extinction of
the Mammoth fauna took place in Northern Eurasia between the
Pleistocene and the Holocene and was significantly delayed in the
northern part of Eastern Siberia. In the 1990s radiocarbon dates
proved that mammoths existed for most of the Holocene on Wrangel
Island - from 8000 till 3700 years BP. New radiocarbon data show that
wild horses inhabited the northern part of Eastern Siberia (the lower
stream of Enissey river, the Novosibirskie Islands, and East Siberian
seacoast) 3000 - 2000 years BP. Muskoxen lived on the Taimyr
Peninsula and the Lena River delta about 3000 years BP. Some bison
remains from Eastern Siberia are Holocene in age. The following
circumstances could promote the survival of representatives of the
Mammoth fauna. The cool and dry climate of this region promoted the
maintenance of steppe associations - habitats of those mammals. Late
Paleolithic and Mesolithic settlements are not found in the Arctic
zone of Eastern Siberia from the Taimyr Peninsula to the lower stream
of the Yana River; they are very rare in the basins of the Indigirka
and Kolyma rivers. So the small number of Stone Age hunting tribes in
Northeastern Siberia was another factor in long-term survival of some
representatives of the Mammoth fauna.
"

COMPARISON OF THE EXTINCTION OF MEGAFAUNA IN INTERIOR ALASKA-YUKON
TERRITORY WITH THE ARRIVAL OF HUMANS (L)

R. Dale GUTHRIE

"
The pattern of new dates for mammoths and the other species in the
northern megafauna, allows us to test some of the theories as to what
forces had prevented human colonization of the far north prior to
around 12-12.5 thousand radiocarbon years ago (ka). Though evidence
is suggestive that some species of the megafauna were present but in
reduced population numbers during LGM, their numbers increased
dramatically in the period of 16-13 ka. If large mammal hunting
opportunities had been the factor limiting human range expansion
during and prior to the LGM, that is likely to have been remedied by
15 ka. Yet humans failed to move northward and take advantage of this
higher game density. It would appear then that either climatic
factors (wind, cold, rarity of trees and tall shrubs, and cover), or
the rarity of supplemental vertebrates, such as fish, birds, and mid-
sized mammals, part of the familiar Holocene abundance, kept them
from doing so.
"

This doesn't sound to me like alot of scientist are against the
human involved extinction of mammoths, seems to me that they beleive
that humans did not move densely into the high arctic and high
elevations until recently.

I should repeat my finding with the HLA which concurs with the mtDNA.

People initially moved into the lowlands and low elevations, these
people appear to me to have come from ryukyu, kyushu, and shikoku
region of paleolithic/mesolithic Japan.
There is very strong evidence for the settlement of highland,
dryland peoples into the new world. These peoples were initially
distributed in the arctics and moved down the mountainous regions and
into the higher elevations of south america. This people have a
relationship with the Ainu of northern Japan, and craniometrically
with the Northern Jomon and Ainu, but the molecular studies suggest a
more representative enclave in eastern siberia. These HLA studies
have revealed that these people came from the enterior of asia and
probably would have been considered 'caucasian' and at the eastern
fringes a mixture of asiatic and caucasian prior to this migration.
There is substantive evidence (repeating the word substantive)
for mulitple migrations through the biakal corridor during the late
pliestocene or early holocene. HLA links with Indic, west asian and
middle easterners are numerous, and there is even a credible link
with greco/franco/austrian peoples. These links provide an insight on
the ability of certain groups to migrate over land at some great
relative distances. Then this ability to migrate can be compared with
african peoples, who both by HLA, mtDNA, CD4-intron and a number of
other studies show the less of ability to migrate.

The ability for select human cultures to migrate into and through
less bioproductive highlands and drylands, and tundra like
evolutionarily adapted animals such as the mammoth is a likely cause
of their extinction, previous peoples may have only moved through
these areas facilitatively and opportunistically and thus the impact
on megafauna would have been minimal. It is known for example that in
mexico humans and mammoths lived proximal for a considerable period,
the indigeonous peoples probably migrated to coastal regions or
toward the equator during cold seasons allowing the mammoths to move
in and forage and they then returning to the north and highlands
during the colder periods.
.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Death of Megafauna
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  • Re: Death of Megafauna
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