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Comment by lowdose | Hacker News Reader

There is discussion in this article about why people would have moved these animals over vast distances. But as the Mammoth is in the same family as elephants and I remember elephants choose to die at a location that is revised by their family over time.

Couldn't it be this has been a similar behavior, people coming to a this site and just found 60 remains and build something with it?

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Elephants don't do this...it is a myth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants%27_graveyard

https://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/are-there-rea...

Maybe the myth comes from sites like these.

And maybe sites like these were used to run down mammoth herds down a cliff:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Ko...

Perhaps. I grew up in Montana where they have cliffs like those that the Indians drove bison off of. 10's of thousands at a time...

I wonder if it's true that the herds of Bison were a result of a an ecosystem in rapid change - supposedly when the natives in North America died and cities and farms went to waste because of disease from the South, introduced by the Europeans.

That would have allowed the Bison population to explode.

It probably helped the bison at least. Though, so would the plains not being divided up with barbed wire.

That doesn't jive with my understanding. The US government went about systematic elimination of indigenous people. Part of that was the elimination of bison as a food source. The population of bison declined from the millions to around a thousand in under a decade arout the 1860s.

OP is talking about how it got to millions in the first place, a hypothesized peak between two human populations who were suppressing it.

European states in America went about systematic elimination of the survivors, the pre contact population absolutely dwarfed these remnants and in their time, kept flora and fauna in check across the continent.

I thought I had the answer at hand but (for once) decided to check my facts BEFORE I wrote. Wikipedia has a really interesting article about this, well worth a (very short) read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#Native_American_...

No I’m talking about before there were European settlers in modern day USA. After Cortez, but way before Mayflower.

Supposedly there were many more people on the plains but the human population crashed and the bison took over. This would have coincided with “the Little Ice Age” for further speculation fodder

Nope. The bone beds at the base of "Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump" are meters thick. 13 I want to say? The plains tribes of the area were running huge herds off there for a very very long time.

>The buffalo jump was used for 5,500 years by the indigenous peoples of the plains to kill buffalo by driving them off the 11 metre (36 foot) high cliff.

Further...

>The cliff itself is about 300 metres (1000 feet) long, and at its highest point drops 10 metres (33 ft) into the valley below. The site was in use at least 6,000 years ago, and the bone deposits are 12 metres (39 feet) deep.

Big damn herds, for a damn long time.

That may be, but because I am not a scientist, I can’t be convinced by that data point. I personally lean into that you are right, but to a layperson, it won’t seem impossible that there were smaller and managed for millennia, then exploded for some centuries

The great plains are large enough to support a ton of ruminant life. I'm not sure there needed to be a collapse in North American human population but it probably didn't hurt. I believe I read somewhere that the longhorn population boomed in Texas during the Civil War. It was afterwards that the cowboy culture really took off thanks to the abundance of free ranging cattle.

The argument was that the plains were man made, that there were forests there before, and then suddenly there were no men left, only grass and buffalo.

Is there fossil evidence of forests in the great plains?

I don't think so. This finding is just one piece of the big paleolithic complex, which is systematically excavated for a century. Human remains from the complex cover almost twenty thousand years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kostyonki-Borshchyovo_archaeol...

Interesting. Could still be that paleolithic humans designated an existing mammoth graveyard as a holy site.

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