Megafauna was the meat of choice for South American hunters | Hacker News Reader

Megafauna was the meat of choice for South American hunters

arstechnica.com

58 pointsrbanffy46 comments

I wonder if the extinction of most megafauna happening just before the advent of agriculture and the first civilizations is not just coincidence but direct causation. We spent ~200kyr with a lot of "easy" calories roaming around. So no need for complex societies. Once we caused our first "end of the world" overhunting with stone age technology, and they were gone, the only remaining alternative for the survivors was meager small game that had to be complemented with backbreaking work in the fields trying to raise more plant food. Thus agriculture got popular. With it the need for record keeping and sedentary lifestyle. Only then civilization could be kickstarted.

I imagine that a massive mammoth would require the whole village to bring to the ground and back to the village. Conversely, the whole village isn't needed if it is just chicken on the menu tonight. Hence, I would argue that you need a relatively complex society if dinner is mega fauna.

I also don't entirely follow your point that goes from 'backbreaking work' to 'sedentary lifestyle'. The latter only happened in the post war years when we worked out how to have all of the energy we need on tap. Before then, life was hard, albeit not for everyone since we have hierarchies.

That point is one of many reasons good archaeologists avoid conflating the idea of social complexity with sedentary societies. Modern megafaunal hunters like the Hadza are socially complex. What they don't have are sedentary lifestyles and permanent, entrenched social stratification, even though they're aware that these things are possible.

Meat spoils fast. So your society would need no record keeping(writing) because without refrigeration or salt mining you can't store meat like grain. Animals move around, so taking tons of meat kilometers back to the village takes time that's already counting for spoilage. So you are less likely to have a village in first place. That would be more pratical to go full nomadic and set temporary camp near the carcass of the more recently slaughtered multi-ton beast. No need to transport anthing besides yourself.

> I also don't entirely follow your point that goes from 'backbreaking work' to 'sedentary lifestyle'. The latter only happened in the post war years when we worked out how to have all of the energy we need on tap

By sedentary lifestyle I don't mean individual sedentarism, like being a couch potato. I mean society-wide, in the sense of not living in permanent settlements were people spend their lives mostly in the same plot of land, but are constantly on the move.

You can dry meat. In areas with permafrost you can dig it down and freeze it. You can also just let it ferment. From places like Gontsy we know some hunter gathers transported their kills back to their village before processing it.

https://arheologia.com.ua/index.php/arheologia/article/view/...

>I also don't entirely follow your point that goes from 'backbreaking work'

There is research pointing to hunter gathers only needed to do a couple of hours of work daily, while neolithic people engaged in agriculture had to work much longer hours for the same kcal output.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

The anthropological research that came up with 2-3 hours of work per day only looked at time spent away from camp gathering, hunting, and fishing. When you account for food processing, cooking, water collection, firewood gathering, tool making, shelter maintenance, and textile production the numbers go way up. 40-50 hours per week for a modern hunter gatherer tribe is the floor, and the numbers for a prehistoric hunter gatherer society likely looked significantly worse. Once migrations are taken into account (which is why they do 2-3 hours per day of hunting), the numbers really don’t look that rosy.

This compares to a floor of 50-70 hours per week for premodern agriculture. The other side of it is that many of our estimates for agriculture come from hierarchical societies where a significant fraction of the work performed every year was heavily taxed. It’s hard to disentangle how much work was performed for sustenance of one’s family or village compared to the greater societies development (noble extravagance and all).

It would obviously be more work to bring home a mammoth than something smaller like a deer, but I don't think that that suggests anything much different about the complexity of society. At the end of the day it's just a bunch of hunters bringing home the bacon, perhaps fetching the women to help if there was a lot to bring back.

I'm reminded of the "Alone" TV series where one contestant shot an 800lb Ox with a bow and arrow and single-handedly butchered it and carried it back 2 miles to his camp (requiring about a dozen trips).

>a massive mammoth would require the whole village to bring to the ground

Now if they can only all pull together as a team, it's double Whoppers for everybody. After they come out the winner :)

It's interesting to consider these cause and effects, but I tend to doubt that over-hunting/extintion of megafauna led to farming and agriculture.

It's understandable that ancient hunters might have focused on the larger animals, some of which may also have been less dangerous to hunt, but other smaller animals like deer, bison/cattle, pigs, horses were also common at the time, and even today hunter-gatherer lifestyle seems common among primitive tribes, and agriculture/farming (e.g. Maasai - cattle) less so.

There are other theories for the neolithic revolution and switch from hunter-gatherer to farming lifestyle, including things like population density (partly by cultural choice), and post-ice age climate change enabling farming.

The most reasonable to me is that megafauna come and wreck your farms, so you have to hunt them to extinction before farming is viable. Humans can stop a horse from eating their crops, but stopping an elephant or mammoth is not easy at all, and we see that humans hunted those to extinction right before they started agriculture.

There used to be elephants and mammoths all over the world, but almost all places where humans developed agriculture they had already killed all of them.

In other words, a farm is a megafauna version of a nice fishing lure?

One way to stop them is to eat them :)

It is really hard to kill an elephant, you need a lot of people to do it or big traps. You can lookup videos of people doing that, you have like 100 people standing around throwing spears at it as it slowly bleeds to death and that is when its alone. If its a herd you can't even do that.

So when farming requires you to have a big hunting party constantly ready to take down an elephant, why not just live off elephant meat? The farm doesn't add any value and is very difficult to start.

Barley makes beer.

This is part of the reason why commercial agriculture is so difficult to this day in Africa. Hippos in particular will wreck a harvest in no time.

And African elephants form enormous herds, there used to be herds of hundreds of elephants roaming around, no way stone age level societies can defend against those all you can do is try to avoid them.

Modern guns changed that of course.

All the farming for millenia on the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia in general seems to disagree with that. The Indus Valley civilization certainly had elephants around.

They tamed those though, very different. Tamed elephants wont go wreck your crops and might even keep untamed ones away.

> So no need for complex societies

There was no need for complex societies anywhere ever. You can find primitive peoples in pretty much any environment on earth (hot, cold, wet, dry, etc). I think it’s much more likely there were complex societies we never heard of that have vanished over the centuries. 200,000 years is a long time (and that date only goes further back as our understanding increases). How long would it take for remnants of our civilization disappear if an apocalyptic meteor hit?

A complex society or a natural disaster (a la dinosaurs) wiping out megafauna sounds much more plausible than the equivalent of the primitive societies we see today.

> How long would it take for remnants of our civilization disappear if an apocalyptic meteor hit?

Eons, the nuclear testing in the twentieth century left traces identifiable worldwide as I understand it, hence pre war steel and all that.

We can confidently say we're the first nuclear civilization on this planet at least

> A complex society or a natural disaster (a la dinosaurs) wiping out megafauna sounds much more plausible than the equivalent of the primitive societies we see today.

The problem with your argument is best illustrated with that famous picture of airplane with bullet holes; the only primitive societies you see today are those that are more or less sustainable; any unsustainable primitive society would have gone into a conflict with a major industrial power and ended up being wiped out. That of course does not prove that unsustainable primitive societies never existed; in fact I would say they were the norm as humans were expanding (when the frontier is constantly expanding, there is no need to sustain anything!).

>There was no need for complex societies anywhere ever.

there is no need for life at all

life exists because it replicates and multiplies while testing variations.

apparently complex society variants do a great job of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age

"[Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace."

Myths of pre ice age life were spoken of by plato

The last ice age ended about 9200 years before Plato was writing. He was 2500 years closer to events than we are, and therefore about 21% better informed, I suppose.

Doubt it, and I don't think your math checks out either

I shamelessly edited several times, it may add up better now. And no of course this isn't how things work, the emphasis is on the nine thousand years or whatever the correct extremely large time interval is.

he got the date on the end of the ice age perfectly with his myth about atlantis

This means you have to have hunter-gatherers hanging around the Mediterranean at about 9600 BC to observe events, and they have to be rowing out in canoes (if not Atlantean helicopters) in order to be familiar with the alleged drowned island, and then pass on the history through thousands of years of verbal tradition to the pre-dynastic ancient Egyptians, who can (much later) tell the Greeks. It's possible, but an alternative explanation is no.

Göbekli Tepe is direct evidence of an advanced society over 11k years ago.

Humans are story tellers. Stories last a long time. The youngest fossils of Megalania, which grew up to 7 meters (23 feet) in length and weighing over 600 kg (1,300 lbs), which is the largest terrestrial lizard known to have ever lived, date to around 50,000 years ago, confirming that it was alive when the first Aboriginal people arrived in Australia. Early human inhabitants and the giant lizards would have shared the same environment, and Aboriginal oral traditions about giant goannas may be based on these ancient encounters.

Those stories lasted 50k years.

That's an interesting thing, but all the same, Plato's myths aren't history in any sense, and mistaking them for that is not an error of degree but of type.

What happened to the "may"? So the story is about the "Whowie". It says here it also had six legs and the head of a frog. Based on a true story, maybe.

Do you have a suspect for the Bunyip, by the way? I like that one.

Plato was neither a historian nor an archeologist, he had no way to know anything about the remote past. He made up and repeated myths, which you can impute whatever meanings you like onto, but you should try not to mistake them for a history even if they accidentally fit cherry-picked examples.

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_spectrum_revolution

What, do downvotes mean no? I thought this fitted nicely.

I don't think there's any evidence of that. Megafauna aren't that easy, and there's no general evidence of overhunting all the animals. People weren't going hungry because medium-sized animals were still around, and there are so many more of them!

Agriculture, at first, simply made life easier. You didn't have to be nomadic always looking for more food, you could just stay in one place. Your food was right there. It was awesome.

The problem was, it was so insanely successful -- you were having so many more children because of all the food -- populations shot up and suddenly there wasn't enough food anymore when you had a bad year.

So it's actually the opposite of what you're describing -- from what I understand, famine wasn't really a thing until agriculture caused populations to increase massively.

See this study, which is consistent with your thesis: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/814485

Essentially, it claims that modern humans and our ancestors starting with Homo habilis were primarily carnivores for 2 million years. We moved back to an omnivorous diet starting around 85,000 years ago after killing off the megafauna, is the hypothesis.

The late quaternary megafauna crash is well documented with human hunting pointed to as one of a few causes:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11895740/

I wrote about its impacts on society here:

https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39569747

My argument (which I need to update) is that it was the primary catalyst for society to create the system of private property at scale.

However the roots of ritual society are more likely to be centered around the first sex strike around 70,000 BC, first proposed by Chris Knight in his 1991 book “Blood Relations”

http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/category/menstruation/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_strike

The megafauna crash around 50,000BC then catalyzed the expansion of what was then a novel concept, of ritualized transaction, around more sedentary practices eventually leading to agriculture around 13000BC

> technically, “megafauna” describes any animal over 44 kilograms

TIL we're all megafauna. We should make this a rite of passage, when a kid hits 97 lb they get a megafauna party.

It makes the biggest dinosaurs (50-70 tons) gigafauna...

"They chose sites that dated back more than 11,600 years, before the last of the now-extinct Ice Age megafauna vanished from the continent. The team only counted bones with clear signs that people had butchered the animal for food, like cut and percussion marks."

I understand what they're trying to do here, but is this the best selection criteria? You can basically tear down/debone small animal carcasses with your hands, so there's less likely to be cut and percussion marks.

Yes but then you wouldn’t know it was a human, since only humans kill animals with sharp edges and big sticks

But that's also not proof of anything either, because any human that saw a dead e.g. giant sloth would have absolutely scavenged it.

Well sure, but then they weren't hunting it. Also, they probably found evidence of human made hunting implements near the sites.

No, they just looked at cut marks.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx2615

Hunting rather than scavenging seems to be just an assumption, not investigated. But that's reasonable, they'd surely hunt a delicious giant sloth, why not.

I'd wager we would do both, but a limiting factor is need. A single giant ancient beast could provide literally thousands of pounds of meat. That's feeding a village for a very long time. And taking down one of these beasts, even with reasonably advanced technology would always entail major risk. Even now a days with advanced rifles/ammo, elephant poachers are sometimes killed by elephants. And finally it's not just killing it, but then processing/preserving the meat, and bringing it all home. That would have been a tremendous amount of work.

And nobody really knows how many humans were alive e.g. 10,000 years ago, other than - probably not many. There were almost certainly less than a million humans in the entirety of South America. The max population density there would have been 1 human per 18 square km. But of course in practice we would have huddled around water sources and in small settlements, greatly reducing our overall spread. So you could probably have traveled hundreds of kms in all directions before seeing a single human. That's just not a lot of people to completely eliminate a bunch of massive species throughout an entire continent.

By contrast these species all started disappearing just about the time when we were leaving an ice age. And these animals may have been overadapted not only to the cold, but the associated vegetation/prey and feeding patterns.

Same in most places. Indigenous populations in Australia killed off all the large mammals except a few, in NZ there were a a number of large bird species which were all killed off soon after Maori arrived.

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