What Did The Early People Of Texas Do When The Large Animals They Hunted Became Extinct?
Paleoindians and the Great Pleistocene Die-Off
Bill Reid (Haida artist),
The Raven and the Start Men,
wood etching depicting the Haida
origin myth (British Columbia)Asked in former days where they came from, American Indians answered in every bit many voices as in that location were dissimilar cultures. Given the hundreds of sovereign societies in North America in the early on sixteenth century, this ways hundreds of different voices in former times. Each nation or tribe had its ain theory in which the ancestors either came from elsewhere—a world beneath the current one, lands in the east or west, near a salty sea, and so on—or had ever been where they were at the fourth dimension the question was posed.
Today, in contrast, many American Indians concur with the consensus among scientists (regardless of their ethnicity) over the origin of American Indians. Today's consensus, like all scenarios based in science, changes with new information from new sites or with re-interpretations of sites or artifacts long known, in both instances offering fresh insight on the arrival, spread, and behavior of man in the New Earth. From new data flow new hypotheses, subsequent testing to falsify or confirm them, and adjustments, if necessary, in theories and the conclusions fatigued reasonably from them. For over 1 hundred years—and after a long catamenia of discussion—almost all scientists have agreed that the ancestors of today'south indigenous people came to North America from Asia. And in recent decades they have been in full general agreement that these aboriginal Indians, or Paleoindians (which means "one-time" Indians), every bit they are known, arrived some 13,000–fourteen,000 years ago at the finish of the period known every bit the Pleistocene.
Beringia (light brown—area in a higher place Animation
body of water level during the late Pleistocene;
nighttime dark-brown—area above sea level today)
Beringia, 21,000 B.P.
to the nowadays (NOAA)
The extinctions were remarkable. Animals familiar and unfamiliar, widespread and local, and large and small disappeared. How many species disappeared will never be known, only at least thirty-five mammalian genera (the genus is the next well-nigh inclusive category to the species) vanished. Some animals were well-known creatures similar lemmings, salamanders, and diverse birds. Others were very unfamiliar, including many mammals over 100 pounds in weight—and so chosen megafauna.
They included exotic hulking tusked mammoths and mastodons, which towered elephant-similar over almost all else on prairies and in boggy woodlands. Several types of slow-moving giant ground sloths as large as mammoths also vanished. So did a kind of giant armadillo, armored 2000-pound 6-foot-long glyptodonts resembling zero known today, single-hump camels, stocky half-dozen-human foot-long capybaras, 500-pound tapirs, 300-pound giant beavers, four-horned antelopes, horses, bison-sized shrub oxen, stag-moose with fantastic multiple-palmated and -tined antlers, dire wolves whose large heads and powerful jaws made them resemble hyenas, huge fearsome and active 1500-pound short-faced bears, scimitar-toothed cats which fed on mammoth young, and groovy saber-toothed cats that could gape, sharklike, opening their jaws to a i-hundred-degree angle earlier stabbing or ripping open their prey with their enormous canines.
They all vanished, some at indeterminate times just many between xi,000 and 10,000 years agone, or at the moment or shortly after the moment that Paleoindians arrived. That coincidence has spawned debate as tearing as that over the question of human arrival and dispersal in the New Earth.
Scholars Argue
Remains of seven mammoths killed past Martin's blitzkrieg hypothesis:
Paleoindian Clovis hunters approximately
xiv,000 years ago,
Colby Mammoth Kill Site, Wyoming, ca. 1975
"Human, and man alone, was responsible"
In his search for proof, Martin and his co-workers faux, on the basis of assumptions about when Paleoindians arrived and the rates of reproduction, move, and killing, the blitzkrieg. In one scenario, one hundred Paleoindians arrived on the Alberta prairies some 12,000 years ago, each yr moved southward twenty miles and killed one dozen animals per person, and their population doubled every 20 years—all adequately small-scale assumptions except for the terminal. In only 300 years they numbered 100,000, spread two one thousand miles south, and killed over ninety million 1000-pound animals. In more conservative scenarios it still took relatively few centuries to accomplish Tierra del Fuego at the tip of Southward America, and to chase megafauna to their doom.
Archaeological site in Alberta, Canada, "there are fewer than i hundred
dated to 11,000–thirteen,000 B.P., with bones
of an extinct equus caballus that reveal marks of
human being butchering, 2001
archaeological sites with associated
extinct megafauna"
One problem is that in that location are fewer than one hundred archaeological sites with associated extinct megafauna—mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses, iv-horned antelopes, tapirs, and a couple of other extinct species. For Martin, a negative proves a positive—the sites are few considering the onslaught was against fearless animals and as fast as lightning.
In Martin'due south reasoning, animals had no time to develop fear. Some like slow-moving, sluggish footing sloths must have been especially vulnerable to human being predation. Yet buffaloes, pronghorn antelopes, and other animals survived into the modernistic era alongside humans despite a reputation—especially in the case of bison—of being so assuming or curious that hunters rather hands killed them. It is equally reasonable to propose that Paleoindians played a greater role in the extinctions the longer they were in North America, and today's belief that homo arrived in the New Globe some 1000–3000 years earlier than when Martin wrote, if buttressed and confirmed by future finds, does not really weaken his case.
Clovis fluted spear points, ca. 11,600 B.P.,
found in association with Columbian
mammoth remains at kill sites in the
Upper San Pedro River Valley,
Cochise County, ArizonaA more serious problem is that in Martin'southward scheme, Paleoindians were everywhere required to focus energy and time on megafauna. This does not fit our most sensible speculations today nigh what people like Paleoindians did. Paleoindians are best known for a marvelous applied science called Clovis (subsequently the site in New United mexican states where it was first establish), whose archetypal artifacts are three- to six-inch-long spear points supremely adapted to wounding or delivering the coup de grace to large animals.
But Paleoindian technology was far more varied and cannot be reduced to Clovis points. Collectively, Paleoindians probably hunted non simply at present-extinct megafauna but caribou, deer, beaver, tortoises, birds, and other minor animals. Moreover, they were not simply hunters only (possibly even more than) collectors of seeds, roots, shellfish, and fish. In the concluding several centuries, people who gathered and hunted for their livelihood (and provide ane way to call back about long-ago Paleoindians) tended non to restrict hunting to single classes of animals just instead focused their attentions on animals and plants that minimize the cost of their endeavour relative to their gain. In that location is no reason to assume that Paleoindians were whatsoever different.
In this lite it is interesting that modest animals besides vanished. Some might well take been relevant in a foraging diet but others seem completely irrelevant. Relatively lilliputian is known virtually insects and plants, only at to the lowest degree x genera (and many more than species) of birds disappeared, from jays and ducks to flamingos and raptors. Some no doubt were tasty. Others were scavengers. Curiously, approximately the same percentage of birds as megafauna disappeared.
Preserved spruce forest discovered buried
in sand in northern Michigan in 1999,
10,000 years after late-Pleistocene warming
caused spruce forests in the region to be
replaced with pine forests; core samples
taken to report tree-ring dataThis coincidence alone suggests that we wait elsewhere for causes before we conclude that man alone was responsible for Pleistocene extinctions, which brings us to climate. At the stop of the Pleistocene, the climate became drier and warmer. Most important, temperatures warmed past some thirteen degrees Fahrenheit and seasonal extremes spiked equally winters became colder and summers hotter. In these new conditions, grasses and other plants and insects flourished or died, as did invertebrate and vertebrate organisms in turn. Entire habitats changed chop-chop; upper Midwest spruce forests became pine forests almost overnight. For animals with firm boreal forest associations, such every bit mastodons, the consequences might have been dire. And once big herbivores, which in sufficient numbers tin can transform the surround, are extinct, the floral limerick of habitats tin can change to affect smaller grazing animals to the point of extinction.
The examples could exist multiplied, merely at nowadays there is much we do not know about the consequences of presumed climatic and vegetational changes on specific species—for some, less food; for others, grasses more difficult to metabolize, or even toxic. If extinctions are considered on a case-by-case ground, then factors like biomass, reproductive biological science, overspecialization, feeding strategies, dependencies, and competition demand investigation for their role in a item species' vulnerability.
Much remains conjectural, simply climate is linked both to the rapid evolution of mammalian forms and to extinctions that occurred long before human beings arrived on the scene. In the last x million years in Northward America there were 6 other periods when many species became extinct. Causation in these episodes is far from clear, but temperature and other climatic and bounding main level fluctuations are correlated with them. The nigh contempo to the Pleistocene extinctions are those that took identify at the terminate of the preceding era, the Pliocene, and there are marked similarities in climatic deterioration in these two eras. In the long view, extinction seems normal in the history of life. Indeed, most species that e'er lived are extinct.
If climate fatally complicates the simplistic idea that man lone was to blame for the Pleistocene extinctions, there is still too much we neglect to understand well-nigh climate to ascribe responsibleness to it lonely. Thus we should not get to the other farthermost and dominion out birthday a part for Paleoindians. After all, they and their distinctive hunting technology were widespread and associated with brute remains, which at least shows a gustatory modality for species now extinct. Perhaps climatic changes overwhelmed sure animals and plants and left them and others susceptible to a Paleoindian insurrection de grace.
Left: Moa leg bones assembled by Correct: Skeleton and egg of an extinct
paleontologists, New Zealand, 1940s
Canterbury Museum, NZ
elephant bird, Republic of madagascar, 1913
Monnier/NSF
Paleoindians might have been like preindustrial humans elsewhere. In the Pacific, for example, native people exterminated numerous species of birds before Europeans arrived. In Hawaii, they cleared land with fire, introduced animals, diverted streams for irrigation, and transformed forested coastal areas into farms and grasslands, and mudflats into fishponds. The result: over one-half of all endemic bird species became extinct. The Hawaiians ate some and killed others for their feathers to ornamentation wear. Some birds vanished with their habitats. In New Zealand, early on Polynesian colonizers hunted xiii species of moas—ostrich-like flightless birds, 1 of which towered over men and women—to extinction and turned their attention to what remained—shellfish, fish, seals, and small birds.
Because North America is a big continent, not a small-scale island, the very large island of Madagascar in the Indian Bounding main might provide a meliorate model for what happened at the end of the North American Pleistocene. Here likewise animals and birds became extinct: big flightless birds, giant tortoises, hippos, more xv species of lemurs, and other animals. They vanished in the wake of the Indonesian-East African ancestors of the Malagasy, who evidently arrived during a period of drought in a longterm climatic cycle aquiver from wet to dry, a coincidence that doomed more species than either humans, desiccation, or vegetation changes alone could have.
Three-foot mammoth tusk discovered
on Wrangel Island off the coast of
Siberia (the last known site of
mammoth home) during a 1998
expedition to research the
hyperdisease hypothesis
"The Pleistocene extinctions
keep to resist audio-bite
explanations."
Guiding Educatee Discussion
Coverage on Kennewick Man, "The interest in homo origins
1997–2000
in the New World is intense."
In The Ecological Indian (1999), I explore in one chapter the information and arguments for the inflow of humans in the New Earth and for the Pleistocene extinctions. The chapter contains many references to articles and books by the principal researchers, and to many pieces readily available in the pop press (see Works Cited). My conclusions at that place (and here) can be updated past a stream of materials that find their mode into the national printing. An Internet search volition turn up the latest sites, dates, interpretations, and controversies pertaining to the New Globe prior to the inflow of Europeans (run into Links to Online Resources).
From 1995–2003, the most visible discussions have been on
- extinctions in N America and elsewhere (especially New Zealand, where the large flightless moas were eradicated) in the tardily Pleistocene and at other times
- the possibility of a very early on European migration to Northward America—a highly controversial idea
- the dating of the earliest sites, some from the southern tip of Southward America
- how to think about and what to do with Kennewick Human being, the most famous early American whose remains were discovered in 1996 in Kennewick, Washington, who has been claimed by American Indians and others every bit an aboriginal ancestor, and whose remains are highly desired in the scientific world
- evidence for the primeval domestication of plants and urbanism in the New Globe, and for cannibalism amongst the Anasazi.
These are the hot topics. There are matters to discuss and argue in all these topics. They are covered with some regularity in journals and magazines like Science, Scientific discipline News, Nature, and National Geographic, and in the national press—newspapers like the New York Times, major newswires, and weeklies like U.Due south. News & Globe Report.
This discussion of the Pleistocene extinctions provides opportunity to talk about a number of other issues, including extinctions as a general phenomenon in earth history, the specter of mass extinction in the 21st century, and programs to reintroduce predators to areas where, because they have been absent-minded, their prey no longer fear them. What kinds of conservation lessons, if whatsoever, can be drawn from late-Pleistocene extinctions? The belatedly-Pleistocene events likewise can be used to reflect on the signs for, and the consequences of, global warming equally the virtually significant current climate change.
Some other topic that could be plumbed is epistemological. Narrowly, this unit of measurement concerns a debate over the role of human hunters in late-Pleistocene extinctions. Merely embedded in it is a debate over the utility of a western scientific viewpoint versus a non-western, non-scientific indigenous perspective. It came to the fore in the passages contrasting how Vine Deloria deemed for Pleistocene extinctions (run into Red Earth, White Lies, 1995), and how whatever western-trained scientist would approach the question. Northward. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, discusses the problems in an op-ed ("Agonizing the Spirits," New York Times, 2 Nov 1996). The contrast is besides evident in the sharp disagreements over Kennewick Man between scientists and certain American Indians, who argue that the former can tell them nothing they do not already know from their elders concerning their own history—see Roger Downey, Riddle of the Bones (2000) and David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars (2000). (Meet Works Cited.)
Depressions in bed of Paluxy River,
Glen Rose, Texas; held by creationists
as evidence that dinosaurs and humans
co-existed, a theory rejected by
evolutionary scientists who conclude that
simply dinosaur tracks exist at the siteWith acceptable preparation, and under the right circumstances, 1 could discuss and fence the methodology of science and the differences betwixt scientific truth and revealed truth. What prove in support of Martin'south or Deloria'due south (or anyone else's) theory is sufficient, necessary, or convincing? What evidence damages these theories? The connection here with the debate between evolutionary scientists and creationists is obvious if one wants to go there. This has too been a lively field in recent years, both on the practical level of country curriculums where efforts take been fabricated to eliminate evolution altogether or to teach cosmos as science, and on the level of ideas where scientists non but debate the implications of postmodernism for objectivity in science, but seek rapprochement between science and organized religion (see Chet Raymo, Skeptics and True Believers, 1998).
Because it is set at the fourth dimension of the arrival of American Indians in the New World, this narrative about the human relationship betwixt Paleoindians and animals at the finish of the Pleistocene besides, and finally, provides an provides opportunity for discussion of the names used by and for Indian people—the indigenous or ancient people of the Americas. Today, Due north American Indians use "Indians," "American Indians," "Native Americans," and "Offset Nations" to refer to themselves fifty-fifty if they most frequently recall of themselves as belonging to a particular nation or tribe like Inuit, Sioux, Cherokee, Anishinaabe, Mi'kmaq, or Gwich'in. (Many of these more than specific names are likewise of great involvement equally lessons in the role of outsiders [other Indians and Europeans] and politics in ethnonymy—see William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, 20 vols. Washington D.C., 1978– ). Of equal importance is that at that place was no such thing as the "American Indian," except in the European imagination. Rather, there accept always been many unlike Indian people, many split up sovereign communities or nations, and many dissimilar languages, cultures, and histories. Information technology then follows that Indian people were not of a single voice on the inflow of humans in the New World or of their origins as distinctive societies.
Source: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nattrans/ntecoindian/essays/pleistocene.htm
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