Archaeologica.org

Always had doubts about that idea Roc. Just what would you do with several hundred tons of meat, and getting it back to base would be a 'Mammoth' task.

Unlikely that they would slaughter an entire herd just to harvest one animal. Goes against the observed pattern of "primitives" who tend to be much more in tune with nature than we are.

Digit wrote:Always had doubts about that idea Roc. Just what would you do with several hundred tons of meat, and getting it back to base would be a 'Mammoth' task.

Exactly. Today we don't drop the cattle and drag them into the meat packing plant. We dispatch them inside. I am convinved, the mammoth hunters did the same. They take them down in a place where they already have a processing facility setup. Even smaller beasts of the 500 kilos or larger variety are tough to manhandle when they are "dead weight".

The Kenosha site I talked about before is a good, old fashioned muck hole. The conclusion of the guys on site is that the animal was either found stuck in the mud, or driven into the mud.
It was butchered on site and the meat taken away.
They can see where they worked on the carcass from the top down, and just gave up when it wasn't worth it to dig any deeper.
Remember they had no way to preserve meat.
There was such a thing as "enough for now" and they could walk away from good meat. After all, "there will always be another one."
That was the extent of their being in touch with their surroundings.

The value of salt is ancient. Are you sure there was no meat preservation?

Anyway, we, in the U.S. all have this image of the noble "savage" (no slander intended) living harmonioulsy with his environment and never killing an animal except when necessary for provision and then always using nearly 100% of the remains.

That is not nature's model, however. The lion takes down his prey, eats his fill, and leaves the rest to those not so 'fleet of foot' or the scavengers.

In Ice Age Europe and North America, preservation would be no problem in the winter months (probably 6 months). In the summer they probably followed the herds migration, just like Plains Indians did the buffalo.

It's also a small matter to "smoke" the meat.

The large ice sheets, even at less the max, would result in a continous area of high pressure over the ice with a constant wind blowing south (look at Loess soils), this should have produced Tundra for miles south of the ice with a permafrost below. Dig into that, line with stone, place meat within, cover with stone then turf (or similar), instant ice box!

That very thing has been found by archaeologists, Digit.

That whole Nobel Savage concept was dreamed up by a Parisian newspaper columnist who was currying the favor of the urban public that was going through one of it’s “life is too complicated” phases.
He had never even seen the Atlantic Ocean, let alone know anything about how an Indian lived.
It was adopted by the US East Coast urban do gooders, who also had never seen an Indian, because it was chic in Europe. Those in the West didn’t think too much of the idea. Many of them were busy defending their families and livestock.

It is the same load of stuff we are supposed to think of the “unspoiled wilderness and it’s innocent inhabitants” in the Amazon. The story just doesn’t stand up.

Like I keep saying Beag, they weren't stupid.

Minimalist wrote:Unlikely that they would slaughter an entire herd just to harvest one animal.

The mountains of hundreds upon hundreds of tusks indicate they weren't difficult to come by at all. Looks like they were simply collected from one place. Like from a great heap of dead mammoths at the bottom of a cliff. I bet mammoths don't purposefully gather in one place to die. So something else must have 'gathered' them: HSS with fire.

Goes against the observed pattern of "primitives" who tend to be much more in tune with nature than we are.

That pattern is just one pattern that has been observed. There are many more that show the opposite: very wasteful behavior.

Or a common or garden brush fire Roc, the evidence would not differentiate between the two scenarios. What I will point out is that the Africans have hunted Elephants for thousands of years by separating one animal from the herd and spearing it. The idea of a stampede of 8 ton animals is something I would prefer to stay away from myself.

Rokcet Scientist wrote:

Minimalist wrote:Unlikely that they would slaughter an entire herd just to harvest one animal.

The mountains of hundreds upon hundreds of tusks indicate they weren't difficult to come by at all. Looks like they were simply collected from one place. Like from a great heap of dead mammoths at the bottom of a cliff. I bet mammoths don't purposefully gather in one place to die. So something else must have 'gathered' them: HSS with fire.

Goes against the observed pattern of "primitives" who tend to be much more in tune with nature than we are.

That pattern is just one pattern that has been observed. There are many more that show the opposite: very wasteful behavior.

RS. Looks like you need to turn on BBCode (under options) when you do a post. When you do, your post will like like above.

Acres of mammoth tusks reminds me of the "elephant graveyard" things I have seen as a kid. I don't know if these are real or legend but maybe you are refering to the "mammoth" version of the elephant graveyard or a lemming-like mass suicide.

There are dinosaur graveyards with thousands of bodies piled up, too. The interpretation is flood debris.

It's hard to imagine enough of a human presence in Siberia to account for such vast pile-ups.