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and you'd need a BIG hole.

You'd have to be a bigger asshole to walk up to a mammoth head on and wave a spear at it.

Not at all good for longevity.

It's the number of points found at these sites that started my train of thought Min.
We have few facts, one is that they killed Mammoths, and two, that they used spears.
From there it's simply? a matter of working forward.

Roy.

Reasonable.


I recall a discussion with Charlie one time about the re-sharpening of points. Start off with a large point and as it dulls or chips you re-knapp it to make it sharper. This also makes it smaller. So a 'spear' point could be whittled into an atlatl point and when it was broke again they abandoned it.

The preponderance of 'abandoned' points is something that has always bothered me Min, some seeming to be too new to simply leave behind.
It has occurred to me that the reason might be that the point was embedded too deeply within a part of the carcass to be retrieved.
PS.
Further thoughts.
Questions have been asked on this forum about how to bring down a large Mammoth. If the Elephant is a suitable comparison they can run faster than we can, so one thing that comes to mind is to keep it circling if it charges, this would expose its flanks to spear men, with enough wounds then just leave time and blood loss to bring it down.
Anyway, they did it!
Now there are two ways in which it is going to hit the deck, straight down on all fours, or on one side. If the second you can wave good bye to your spears. This may well account for their number at kill sites, but leaves me with yet another problem.
Just how the Hell do you butcher a ten ton Mammoth?


Roy.

“It was self evident that to reach heart or lungs required penetration that probably could not be achieved with either atlatl or spear.”

I don’t know if that is true.

American Indians did a pretty good job on bison with spears.
Not as big as a mammoth, but still good sized.

And Eskimos have been doing to whales, from boats no less, for some time.

And don’t they still have spear wielding elephant poachers in Africa?

The lungs are the target. They are closer to the surface and a spear hanging out and banging around does a real job of cutting them up.

kbs2244 wrote:“It was self evident that to reach heart or lungs required penetration that probably could not be achieved with either atlatl or spear.”

I don’t know if that is true.

American Indians did a pretty good job on bison with spears.
Not as big as a mammoth, but still good sized.

And Eskimos have been doing to whales, from boats no less, for some time.

And don’t they still have spear wielding elephant poachers in Africa?

The lungs are the target. They are closer to the surface and a spear hanging out and banging around does a real job of cutting them up.

But WHY would they do it at all, kbs? For what purpose?
'Elephantidae' are virtually unedible for humans, and difficult and dangerous to hunt. While there are millions of yummie tender antelopes running around at the same time. So what would have been the point of hunting 'elephantidae'? There wasn't an Asian ivory market yet!

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 009AARnUCC

Even answers some of my questions as I was curious as to how hunters would get to the side that the animal was lying on.

Roy.

So you think HE would have dismembered mammoth with flint cutters and broiled it on a huge bar-b-que?

Either that or an awful lot of Mammoth died of self inflicted wounds RS.

Roy.

I once watched a television show of bushmen hunting elephant. First, there was ritual, as they realized they could be killed doing it. Two, it was in dense jungle, they crept up and wounded a leg, then tracked it until it died.

This is very different than hunting Elephantidae on Elephant created savanah. There Elephants will nurse a sick or wounded member.

To my mind, homo evolved in symbiotic relationship with Elephantidae. (Chapter 2, Man and Impact in the Americas) No doubt the other smaller animals on the Elephant pastures were more feasable foods for a long time.

The problem was the cats, large and small, and to a lesser extent hynena. Man must have helped Elephantidae to deal with them.

Foot punji traps don't seem to have been feasable, unless covered with s**t, perhaps inducing gangrene?

Could homo have followed rogues or mating wounded males?

The problem we have here is too much speculation on too little data. The slaughter site reports need to be gone through again by someone.

Personally I would have thought killing a Mammoth with a spear would have been, as suggested by kb, a lung shot.
The programme I watched demonstrated, in their test, that it was not practical. In their test!
Crawling under a Mammoh and stabbing upwards didn't strike me as all that practical either!
According to the programme the lungs were immediately to the rear of the huge head and leg muscles, which would have protected the animal from a fatal thrust, but to the rear of those muscles was the hide, presumably some fat, and provided the spear cleared the ribs, was a lung.
This would, as kb pointed out, have made the lungs the obvious target area. No need to carry on attacking the beast, once you've pierced a lung it's coffee time. The beast is going no where!

Roy.

Tidying up a few loose ends, atlatl hooks, in Europe, date from well before the Clovis era.

As far as penetration / power goes, it's a trade off. Heavier spears deliver more kinetic energy over shorter distances. It's not unlike .34 calibre squirrel rifles and .60 calibre big game rifles made during the round ball black powder era.

I've stood and watched while a couple atlatl distance competitors practiced whipping seven-foot darts 275 yards without seeming to work very hard at it.

uniface wrote:I've stood and watched while a couple atlatl distance competitors practiced whipping seven-foot darts 275 yards without seeming to work very hard at it.

Are there any online vids of that?

Frankly I think the distance is irrelevant if they don't penetrate.

Roy.

Here ya go, Rokcet
http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/forums ... Links.html

Dig : Try and grasp the concept that shafts (length and diameter) and points are adjustable to accomplish specific objectives. A shaft that passes completely through a wild boar or elk, exiting the other side, would more than enough penetration to reach the vital area of a mastodont or mammoth.

Here's the abstraction business again. If and if and if. All speculative, and productive of nothing but further speculation. With respect to which, (from memory here) the concentration of points in one western mammoth kill site was at the atlas vertebra -- the point where the spine meets the skull. Splitting which, or finding the seam would result in instant paralysis.