Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

They had larger brains than us.

>I find humans amazing. An adult mammoth is something even the more largest predators would not attempt to hunt. And yet, here is a band of puny 2 legged mammals armed with sticks with a flint at the end, hunting and killing masses of these mighty beasts.

Humans are the only animal with the ability to communicate complex abstract future plans (e.g. "today we all shore up the pit, tomorrow you guys wait over there and we'll drive them into this pit"). And it's not like animals can outrun us either. We're quite slow in a sprint but out cooling system is optimized for a very high duty cycle so we can just keep on chasing. Imagine being hunted by Terminator or Agent Smith. That's what the water buffalo or mammoth feels like

And maybe the best "primitive tech" ever is fire!

Don't chimpanzees etc. also coordinate hunting/raiding parties?

I also recall a segment from BBC's Blue Planet, where an octopus and another fish whose name I cannot recall (grouper?), two entirely different species, communicate with each other via the color of their skin to surround and trap prey.

> Our most amazing ancestors were not kings and emperors, but rather these pre-historic hunters and gatherers who carved out a niche as alpha predators using brains, language, and primitive tech.

Of course. What profoundly intrigues me though, is trying to imagine what it must have been like to be -conscious- even before that primal epoch:

To be just on the cusp of awareness and intelligence.

To have thoughts and desires and fears and hopes and loves and hates and plans and dreams, but not knowing what to do with them, or being able to communicate them.

We spent tens of thousands of years being helpless against the environment, against hunger, disease, predators, against each other's instincts and urges.

Imagine being left behind during a hunt, broken and bleeding out.. All the individual suffering that has taken place on this planet, all the sentient thoughts that died alone and confused.

Then imagine how many other worlds out there must be going through the same development right at this very moment.

Humans are a comparatively new species disrupting the entire planet. The other animals simply weren't prepared for us. A good twitter thread about this topic: https://twitter.com/DRMegafauna/status/1084896526151942145

> An adult mammoth is something even the more largest predators would not attempt to hunt.

Not to dispute your larger point, but lions hunt African elephants, which are a similar size to mammoths (many mammoths were actually smaller).

A lot of ancient myths about the origin of humanity involve some figure stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans (Prometheus being perhaps the best known example). Interesting how this aligns with this story: fire being the technology that distinguishes humans from other animals.

> Eating bone marrow played a key role

This conclusion is a big leap, even as per the article you shared. "The strength required to access the high calorie content of bone marrow may have played a key role in the evolution of the human hand and explain why primates hands are not like ours, research has found."

It's just a possibility. They can't even make a strong claim about it.

It is hi-story.

Notably, the classic story of fur-clad prehistoric humans digging pits to trap mammoths is quite unrealistic in colder climates (where wooly mammoths lived): digging large pits in frozen soil with nothing but bones, sticks and maybe shoulder blades (as spades) is extremely hard.

I wonder what the average temperature of Mexico was during that time...

I just watched a PBS video about this yesterday [1]. Horses evolved in North America, walked across the land bridge to Asia, died out in North America during the ice age, were domesticated in the Eurasian Steppe, were transported back to North America by Europeans, and then became feral on the plains that they initially evolved on.

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZoTvXvV02A

kinda related, an interesting story about pronghorn evolving speed in order to outrun North American cheetahs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHP1Ac7GX_Q

> One of these could feed your family for the entire winter.

Aaawwwwww, dad, mammoth meat agaaaaain?

I'd be interested to see ancient solutions to this.

For example, if you were to tie the mammoth down, you might be able to cut off a few legs and eat them, while bandaging up the mammoth to keep it alive for a week or so till you kill it and eat the rest.

Meat keeps just fine in winter as long as you don't let other animals get to it. Foraging/gathering plant based food is also much less productive in winter. If you kill it at the right time it will feed you until spring. That said I think that approach won't work well with the climate in Mexico.

Perhaps they used salt as a preservative?

I would assume that they setup shop prior to hunting and it was a whole group/village affair to process and preserve the meat. When I grew up we would hunt and process all the deer killed together as a family. I started around 6yrs old, my duties were removing the "silver skin" with a fillet knife and doing any other menial task like manually cranking the meat grinder. Everyone had tasks, and it was a pretty great family/bonding experience with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was the same for all the other food we would harvest and preserve. I miss those times.

Ya, but a single mammoth could provide exponentially more meat for the same efforts of hunting multiple smaller animals.

We even hunted them to extinction, many thousands of years ago.

I believe hunting big mammals is where we had a comparative advantage over other predators, so we did well on that.

Perhaps this only seems inconceivable to you because you've never tasted succulent mammoth meat. Maybe they tasted great. Either way, I wager successfully taking down a mammoth was an exceedingly rewarding experience in numerous ways.