Mammoth extinction: Did Paleo-Indians hunt the mammoth to extinction?

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HOT SPRINGS—Back in 1974 mammoth bones were discovered at a construction site in Hot Springs, South Dakota. Since that time the remains of over 60 mammoths have been recovered at the site, dating from 140,000 years ago to 26,000 years ago. There are a couple of smaller Woolly Mammoths near the 26,000 years ago level, but the mammoths below that are of another species, the Columbian Mammoth, larger and far less hairy than the Woolly. In some artistic depictions they are shown with little more hair than a modern elephant.

There was an even larger species than the Columbian, the Imperial Mammoth. This mammoth was also sparsely haired and stood between three and four feet taller at the shoulder than a modern African elephant. And as heavy as 12 tons, it could be twice the weight of the African elephant. These three mammoth species, the Imperial, Columbian, and Woolly, lived beside another cousin species, the mastodon. The mastodon was shorter and longer and more hairy than the Imperial or Columbian mammoths. All four species became extinct about 10,000 years ago.

Scientists call large species, especially the extinct ones, megafauna. Extinction Level Events, ELE, tend to target megafauna. This was true during the Permian Extinction, 255 million years ago, and during the K-T Extinction, that wiped out the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. The last major ELE occurred between 50 to 10 thousand years ago and is called the Quaternary Extinction. This is the only ELE that we know for certain occurred during the time of humans.

This means that the possibility that Paleo-Indians and these four species interacted with each other is a certainty. The remains of Paleo-Indians are so recent they are not fossilized, and though they are fully modern humans, they differ in that they had a much more robust physiology on average.

There are many theories about why the most recent ELE killed off the mammoth and mastodon. Climate change, scant vegetation, and human predation are often alleged to have been a lethal cocktail. Many tribes, including our own, have a word or term for mammoth. Our term is čé woȟéške, Scientists assert that this term was applied to the fossils of mammoths and does not directly reference the extinct species when it walked the earth.

But if Paleo-tribes hunted the mammoth they must have had a term for the animal. Oceti Sakowin oral tradition is powerful, and the term could have survived the millennia. Our mammoth hunting ancestors are often cited as a contributive factor in the extinction of mammoths. But the last ELE was worldwide, except in Southeast Asia and Africa where the majority of megafauna survived. The population levels of both India and Central Africa were higher than those of Paleo North America, and yet these people did not hunt the elephant to extinction. The level of difficulty to kill a smaller Indian elephant in the jungles of Asia, cannot be as demanding as hunting down a Woolly mammoth on the frozen tundra. Because after the last ELE, human civilization became very sophisticated in both India and Africa, whereas the change in the North American habitat of the extinct megafauna was minimal, basically advancing from thrusting spear and atlatl to bow and arrow. And those advanced civilizations in Asia and Africa still did not make the megafauna of their habitat extinct.

Whatever the cause of the last ELE, the result was the same as previous ELE—the dominant megafauna went extinct. The odds that there were Paleo-Indians around to hunt dinosaurs to extinction are extremely thin.

The theory is the megafauna predators (Saber tooth cats, American lions, Dire wolves) went extinct because their megafauna prey went extinct. But the American Cheetah went extinct at that time. This predator was not related to African cheetahs, but to mountain lions, just adapting similar attributes to the African cheetah through convergent evolution. The most curious thing about Pronghorn antelope is they have massive lungs far beyond what is required to thwart predators. Pronghorn not only have remarkable stamina and speed, they tend to isolate in groups away from contact and this is why you find little Pronghorn roadkill.

The other megafauna who were not the cheetah, are alleged to have gone extinct because they lost their food source. So why did the cheetah go extinct? There are still plenty of Pronghorn loping about.

Then there is the problem of the mastodon. While mammoth evolved to graze, the mastodon was a forest dweller, with far different teeth. He would have starved out on the grasslands. His diet was mainly leaves, twigs, bark, roots and shrubs, If mammoth went extinct because of vegetation reduction, the loss of his grassy food source, as is now currently theorized, then why did the mastodon go extinct, when his forest habitat hardly changed?

These inconsistencies, the megafauna of Asia and Africa not being hunted to extinction, the mastodon going extinct when he had plenty to eat, the cheetah going extinct when he had plenty to eat, indicate paleontologists have no real idea why the Quatenary megafauna went extinct. The killer’s identity hides in plain sight. The killer has been around for hundreds of millions of years, all the way back before the Age of Fishes, in the oceans, on the land, in the air, and that killer is not our ancestors, but that killer always had one chief target—the megafauna. The answer may lie in why this killer spared the Asia and African megafauna. But the Paleo-tribes of North America more than likely did not have the power to hunt the mammoth to extinction, given larger population groups with more advanced hunting techniques did not hunt elephants to extinction. They did not even hunt the rhino to extinction, It took modern societies, a planet with billions of people, not tens of millions of Paleo-hunters, to accomplish that.

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of OST. Contact him at skindiesel@msn.com)

(Photos by Gail Haveman – The Mammoth Site Hot Springs, SD)

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