Study reveals mammoth as key food source for ancient Americans
uaf.edu
uaf.edu
After a bit of digging it appears that this study is important because:
1. It's direct evidence of mammoth consumption vs the existing evidence of arrow heads and other tools being found alongside of mammoth remains.
2. There's apparently been a growing movement to paint Clovis culture as primarily relying on plants and smaller animals in spite of the existing evidence so this confirms the traditional view.
The most glaring example of this is the Muslim conquest of India which happened primarily because the Muslims had a diet rich in meat and the vegetarian Hindu Indians lacked the necessary protein and fat and so were defeated.
(a) zero infants killed and butchered their own mammoth;
(b) the meat from a dead mammoth was not held in reserve for infants.
A population that is protein-starved will be in real trouble, no matter how plentiful everything else is. I think it makes perfect sense to give special attention to the protein source, even if it's also a major energy supplier with the fat that comes along.
But of course it's well possible that the focus on protein is mostly coincidental, as described in GP's excellent post, and not so much motivated by substitutability. But I'd argue that it's a convenient coincidence.
> The most problematic aspect of the paper is the speed with which it races from a single data point in Montana to humans playing a role in megafaunal extinctions hemisphere-wide,” David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University who was not involved in the work, tells the New York Times.
And while the findings are a “big deal,” as anthropologist Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona, who did not participate in the research, tells Science News, “I don’t know how you could ever test them unless you found more human remains.”
The reality: they ate whatever was plentiful in the particular area they were living in.
That seems about right to me, apart from avoiding salt. Wikipedia says humans of that time period did eat some grains too.
It always seemed like a false choice to me. It's not like humans need to literally hunt a species to extinction to wipe it out. We can (and have) done it by disrupting the food chain, altering environments and introducing invasive species as well.
The push back against ancient humans causing or at least, significantly contributing to extinctions feels odd. Few would argue that human activity, even absent hunting or advanced technology, can threaten species today, but for some reason it's considered impossible for ancient peoples.
Additionally, during the same time period megafauna in Africa have (well, until recently) continued to thrive despite the presence of humans and earlier hominids for millions of years.
The difference is that humans were not native to the Americas, and arrived rather suddenly some tens of thousands of years ago. Meanwhile animals in Africa (and Asia and Europe which were populated much earlier than the Americas) spent much more time co-evolving with humans as predators.
Why? They survived greater climatic change/habitat loss before.
Not unlike how our current wave of sustainability is a result of ruining our environment.
Calves expected by 2028.
I never understood this. The colonists walked across the American continent in a couple years. A friend of mine walked from Mexico to Canada in 3 months.
That's a lot of supposing. Different individuals may have different ideas. Some get itchy feet. Some get banned from the community. Some run away.
There's just too little evidence to make these generalizations. One reason I'd hate to be an archaeologist is there's just frustratingly scant evidence.
Just look at the history of theories about Stone Henge.
I think that HN should split karma between previous mentions [2]. This could help better attribute value to contributors whose comments or posts spark further discussion, spreading recognition more evenly. What do others think?
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2024-12-10/ty-article-ma...
So your karma number didn’t go up when you did the thing but it did when someone else did the thing. It seems unfair, but it’s almost an anti-feature in that it can disincentivize karma motivated posting behavior. Find something else to post and try again? It’s not worth getting too attached to post traction. The time of posting seems to have more to do with how well a post does than the particular link or who posted it first imo.
Other cultures did things like ferment meats and salt cure them, but if you're inland away from easy access to excess salt, it's pretty hard to do that and not get food poisoning.
He said when they killed something that big they would light a signal smoke fire and the entire village would come to the and basically have a party until it was all eaten.