Cloth-Clad Clovis

[Digit]

I have no problem with that concept at all Uni, but if you would simply stick to my OP it was in reference to spears pre atlatl, and all the points that I have seen in association with early Mammoth kills are bricks, and taking your point, the heftier weapon would still, IMO, be the better choice even after the Atlatl.
Accuracy, velocity etc all are of no import if they don't penetrate, and as I pointed out half of the darts did not in the demo, which isn't supposition. Also the hide of large pachyderms is upto two inches thick and the expert/pro spear makers/throwers all agreed that a hefty weapon would be the best choice. Again this isn't supposition or theory.

Roy.

[Minimalist]

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.

Or perhaps some big nasty cat showed up and chased them away? If you pull your spear out and the point is detached it certainly might not be cost effective to spend a lot of time trying to cut it out. Especially if it is the intention of the group to hack off the legs and take them back to camp or somewhere more defensible than the kill site.

THere are a lot of variables here.

[Digit]

There are indeed Min. I have long suspected that the early spear points probably could not be withdrawn if embedded to their full length.

Roy.

[uniface]

Bricks ? ! ? Since a second mention must not be a typo but intentional, scroll down to the third picture
http://theclovissite.wordpress.com/collections/

All Clovis points, illustrating their range of lengths.

[circumspice]

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.

I wonder about the demographics of the hunted animals vs scavenged animals or animals that were stampeded off a high place.
Were the animals predominately young, old, sick, pregnant? What? How did the hunter select an animal to kill?

[Minimalist]

There are indeed Min. I have long suspected that the early spear points probably could not be withdrawn if embedded to their full length.

Roy.

Yes, well......these things did not happen in a vacuum. If you stick an animal with a spear there is going to be a reaction. Even if you succeed in finding a gap between the ribs the odds are that even if you don't twist the point around the animal will move and the result will be the same: a spear point stuck in the rib cage.

Think about the predicament of a stone age hunter hanging on to the back of a thrusting spear with a few tons of pissed off mammoth stuck on the other end. I think I would not wait for the point to dislodge or detach.

[wxsby]

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.

Seeing that video convinces me that anyone who depended on that technology to survive could bring down any animal, be it elephant or cat. And could defend his kill by the same means. Those darts had enough inertia to kill anything, as long as their aim was good enough. Targets could be eyes, necks, spines... they were heavy enough to penetrate far enough to eventually cause death... or disability, enough to finish it off. Picture 10 or 20 men all firing at that rate at a specific area.

But again, I'm the newby here and all my statements are mostly really questions. That's my first look at an atlatl marksman.

[Frank Harrist]

Were we talking about cloth?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bog/america.html
" many of the dead, particularly the younger ones, were wrapped in handmade fabrics or textiles. These finely crafted materials fly in the face of any stereotypical notions one might have of hunter-gatherers as hide-wearing primitives."

I have thrown a dart or two with an atlatl. It's actually pretty easy. It feels like an extension of your arm. They are deadly accurate and have serious knockdown power. I think that several people firing these things could bring down any prey, with a little organization and planning.

The difference between dart points and arrow points.....hmmmmmmm. Well mostly it's the size, but also to some degree the shape. But, primarily weight would have been the determining factor. If it was too heavy the arrow wouldn't fly very far very accurately. It's kind of a judgement call most times.. Arrow points were generally what most people call "bird points". Very small. They were just the sharp point of the projectile. As light as possible. The shaft supplies the inertia.

[Digit]

This is beginning to wear me down!
Uni, would you please forget spear throwers, forget Clovis. Could we please go back to the time when the spear was the latest must have tool!
Now would you please describe to me what you think that weapon would have looked like?
Min. I doubt very much that you would be be stupid enough to approach a large animal and stab it with a spear, so why do you assume that our ancestors were?

Roy.

[uniface]

Could we please go back to the time when the spear was the latest must have tool!

Perhaps I have an underactive imagination, but I can't envision such a time. You clearly can. And so vividly that it is a virtual certainty to you, on which much else hinges. Therein lies the rub.

Forgetting Clovis (and along with it, that replication experiments demonstrate that its width dimensions and hafting arrangement make it ideally suited to use as an atlatl dart point), the record shows atlatl hooks in European contexts far older than would have been imagined possible a few years ago. Compound this with atlatl use in Australia and other similarly isolated locations which were peopled early on, and (presumably) not in regular contact with the world outside for the latest technological updates.

Unlike quantum leap advances like making fire using sticks and friction, "If my arm were longer, I could throw this further and harder" is not an insight that would have required a paleolithic DaVinci to come up with, and the practical details would have been a matter of a few trials to get the hang of the parameters.

Beautifully crafted and sophisticated stone tools were only necessary to people who considered them necessary, and many didn't. They do indicate what people were capable of, but their absence is no indication of inherent incapacity. More to the point, like the atlatl, basketry was important nearly everywhere, and was accordingly made nearly everywhere. Some of the most strikingly expert examples of it were made by the Digger Indians of the Western US desert, who had one of the continent's most impoverished technological repertoires otherwise. Thus, for me, the presumed correlation between intelligence (a.k.a., "fitness") and technological sophistication (with sharp stones and pointy sticks as the hypothetical baseline) doesn't flush.

The more I ponder it, the more apparent it seems that the intransigent, unremitting insistence by Darwinians that people in the past be imaged as primitive and stupid is because if they weren't, the whole scheme would collapse. It's not unlike wartime propaganda that paints the enemy as improbably subhuman and vile for the sake of creating a starker contrast than honestly exists (when there even is one at all).

Sure, IF human beginnings were monkeys coming down from the trees with only teeth and fingernails to start with, THEN the Darwinian scheme appears plausible. But the implausibility of the predicatory IF, when considered, removes it (at least for me) from the realm of safe assumption.

That there is no more satisfying model of human origins seems, again on this end, equally irrelevant. The evidence on which such a reconstruction would necessarily depend is so sparse, so open to interpretation and so fragmentary, that presuming to synthesise the bits and scraps we have into a coherent picture (and with a plot line no less) requires leaps of faith at least as large as the habitually cried-down "creationism" does, and both founder on the same objection : that the entire hinges on the hypothetical which is incapable of proof.

Nobody knows. Nobody at this point is in any position to. I can live with that.

[uniface]

In fine : I'm stuck on technologies like Clovis because I can know enough about it to form a general impression. Interest and evidence correlate. Absent evidence, absent interest. At least, as a platform for speculation.

[Minimalist]

but I can't envision such a time.

There had to be a start to the arms race. The first spear was probably just a pointed stick.

Now it looks like a cruise missile.




@Dig. Right, I don't...at least not more than once. This whole image of cavemen surrounding a mammoth and jabbing it with spears is just so Hollywood. They did not have PETA to worry about. But they needed to inflict a few serious wounds and then get out of range until the animal collapsed. THEN you take your thrusting spear and stab it in the throat or belly as a coup d'grace.

Once again, terrain matters. I don't care how far you can throw a spear with an atlatl. If there are trees in the way it is not getting to the target. They had to have different strategies for different terrain.

[Digit]

Sure, IF human beginnings were monkeys coming down from the trees with only teeth and fingernails to start with, THEN the Darwinian scheme appears plausible. But the implausibility of the predicatory IF, when considered, removes it (at least for me) from the realm of safe assumption.

These Monkeys keep creeping in don't they, fine, but not really sure what they have to do with Darwinism.

I'm stuck on technologies like Clovis because I can know enough about it to form a general impression.

Exactly my point Uni, which means that you are totally ignoring the hundreds of thousands of years of stone working that preceeded Clovis.

but I can't envision such a time.

The more I ponder it, the more apparent it seems that the intransigent, unremitting insistence by Darwinians that people in the past be imaged as primitive and stupid is because if they weren't,

And I'm damned if I can see how you come to that conclusion either.

Roy.

[E.P. Grondine]

While speculation provides certain pleasures, and can often be used to limit a solution space, the problem we face here is too little data. I would like to point out that neck wounds would indicate pit traps, but again, there's too little data to generalize.

No one has mentioned fall traps, simply dropping a large weight from a tree or from a narrow pass.
No one considers salt licks and mucks, whose use was observed, and is well data'ed.
No one has mentioned the use of turtles as food sources by early hominids.

By the way, only ruminants survived the YD impacts.

[Digit]

neck wounds would indicate pit traps,

Nope! Only that animal was down low, as perhaps on its side.

Roy.