|
|
 37 the hunters DHJanzen100699.jpg high resolution
|
|
|
Well, where did the herbivorous megafauna go (it is no stretch to realize that when the herbivores went, the carnivores and scavengers went with them)? We know that humans got to the new world (from northern Asia, across the Behring Straits on foot or by boats) at least 25,000 years ago. But about 9,000 BC, a nth wave of very specialized hunters entered North America. Descending on a huge fauna of huge herbivores, it was all over in about 500 years, and probably in any one place, all over within just a few years. These 8,000-year-old spearpoints from Oregon or Washington are magnificent, but nothing compared to the beautiful stonework of Clovis peoples in the southwest. But whatever their skills in making weapons of megafaunal destruction, they clearly swept the new world of its large NAIVE herbivores in a very thorough manner. They were probably specialist hunters, simply killing, eating and moving on. One may wonder how they could have been so thorough, but that question would only be asked by someone who has not witnessed the thoroughness by which European cultures, and indigenous cultures in general, have eliminated the game animals when they had the tools to do so. A stone-tipped lance may not be seen as the equivalent of a machine gun, but when the animals have evolved with no humans as their predators, a spear can be as deadly as a long-distance rifle. There is a second factor, rarely considered. If specialist human hunters took out some large fraction of the adults and juveniles of a prey species in a given area, the (then) starving carnivores would have conducted the clean up. In other words, if you think a human cannot find the last mastodon baby, you can be sure that the starving saber-toothed cat population will do so. Ironically, if those hunting humans had not cleaned the countryside of large herbivores, the (then to follow) more resident agricultural societies would have done so. The African and Indian agroscapes, for example, have long been at war with the resident herbivorous megafauna, and the megafauna is losing. There is nothing so incompatible as a corn field and an elephant. |
||
back to lecture slides
or skip to: