Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 64 posts

Re: Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

#21

Post by thrower123 »

londons_explore wrote: post #19
andrewstuart wrote: post #12

Presumably there would have been a giant feast afterwards because the meat doesn't keep. Would have been fun to attend.

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.

I can't imagine trying to deal with a mammoth. Especially with only stone cutting tools.

The only thing I can think of would be luring one near a winter camp and killing it nearby, when it would be cold enough to keep or freeze.

Even if you could butcher the several tons of meat and get it dried or smoked in time, transport and storage would be huge problems.

It's enough of an ordeal to process a moose, with modern tools and machinery.

Re: Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

#22

Post by dsfyu404ed »

andrewstuart wrote: post #12

Presumably there would have been a giant feast afterwards because the meat doesn't keep. Would have been fun to attend.

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.

Re: Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

#23

Post by ksaj »

Blackfoot natives used to hunt buffalo in Alberta using a similar method, dressed up as coyotes and wolves. One of the known sites has the awesome name of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Smashed-In_Buffalo_Jump

My favourite part of the given history:

> According to legend, a young Blackfoot wanted to watch the buffalo plunge off the cliff from below, but was buried underneath the falling buffalo. He was later found dead under the pile of carcasses, where he had his head smashed in.

Re: Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

#25

Post by BurningFrog »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

> Hunters may have used torches to scare the mammals into the area with the traps, which are about 6ft (1.70m) deep and 25 yards in diameter, but one of the skulls found also had marks of a spear wound on the front. 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,…

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

Re: Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

#26

Post by BurningFrog »

chrischen wrote: post #7
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Didn’t Native Americans use horses? So they were using European horses?

Wild European horses reached many native peoples already in the 1600s, long before they had met any actual Europeans.

Re: Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

#27

Post by gefh »

"The left shoulder blades are missing."

800+ bones from 14 mammoths, but only right shoulder blades. I'm not quite sure what the chances of that being an accident are, unfortunately they didn't say how many right shoulders they found which would make the math easier.

Re: Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

#28

Post by BurningFrog »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #10

Do people seriously believe ancient humans hunted mammoths? I thought it's just a popular myth (some people even believe they rode dinosaurs, you know). Weren't there other animals handier to hunt?

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.

Re: Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

#29

Post by burtonator »

Regardless of the scientific or historical significant here; imagine how amazing it would have been to be a prehistoric hunter and to kill one of these.

It's like the modern version of winning the lottery.

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

Re: Mexican mammoth trap provides first evidence of prehistoric hunting pits

#30

Post by aazaa »

> Both species later became extinct in the Americas.

It might sound odd to suggest that the extinction was caused by people. The conventional view is that there weren't many of them in North America. So how could anything have been hunted to extinction back then?

As documented in 1491 by Mann, this view of a sparsely-populated North America prior to Columbus may not be correct. As many as 10x more people might have lived there, wiped out by one European-borne plague after another. Before they went, they had developed sophisticated technologies to change the landscape and surrounding ecosystems to suit them.

Given all of this, it's much easier to imagine that the mammoths were indeed hunted to extinction by the inhabitants of North America.

Post reply on HN