“If This Were A Murder Trial, We’d Have To Acquit”: Did The Earliest American Cultures Hunt Mammoths To Extinction?

The division is highlighted by the publication today of two studies, one of which argues that the earliest people to reach the twin continents specialized in hunting these enormous Ice-Age beasts, while the other finds no compelling evidence that a single mammoth was ever slaughtered.

Ancient humans are thought to have reached the Americas by passing through the now submerged region of Beringia – which once linked Siberia to Alaska – before spreading southwards. 

Within Beringia itself, the earliest signs of human culture date to about 14,000 years ago. The Clovis cultural complex then appeared in North America some 13,400 years ago, followed by the Fishtail Projectile Point complex in South America around 12,900 years ago.

By analyzing assemblages of animal bones and prehistoric tools found at sites linked to these cultures, one team of researchers has concluded that the earliest Americans ate a very narrow diet consisting almost entirely of megafauna meat. 

As the hunter-gatherers spread to new areas, the researchers write, they specialized in hunting woolly mammoths in Beringia, Columbian mammoths in North America, and both giant ground sloths and gomphotheres – relatives of modern elephants – in South America.

To support this model, the team points to an abundance of hunting and butchering technologies at early Palaeoindian sites, with no evidence of other tools that might be used to process plants or catch small game or fish. 

Megaherbivore remains, meanwhile, make up the overwhelming majority of associated animal remains, perhaps indicating that these large animals were routinely targeted.

“We have shown through our analysis of food resources, mobility, and technology that this strategy made the most sense (in terms of energetic cost-benefits) for small groups of hunter-gatherers in unfamiliar landscapes,” study author Ben Potter at the University of Alaska Fairbanks told IFLScience. 

“The biggest benefit of such an approach is that you only have to adapt to the animals and do not have to learn the landscapes and local plants,” he said. “This adaptation facilitates rapid movement into unfamiliar territory at low population densities, as would be expected for colonizing populations,” added Potter. 

The researchers therefore suggest that early Palaeoindians spread across the Americas by tracking large herbivores, and they note that the extinction of these creatures follows the same curve as the expansion of human culture from North to South America.

Challenging this idea, however, a separate team analyzed all 15 Clovis sites featuring mammoth remains to assess whether the animals were actively hunted or had merely been scavenged after dying of other causes. 

"We went through every site where we have Clovis [stone] points in association with proboscideans like mammoth and mastodon, and we cannot tell whether those animals were killed or already dead and then scavenged,” said study author Metin Eren at Kent State University. 

“There's complete equifinality,” he told IFLScience, suggesting that the final positioning and condition of these bones could just as easily have resulted from hunting or scavenging. 

For instance, his team states that despite the huge number of Clovis artifacts associated with these skeletons, no stone point has ever been found embedded in a proboscidean bone in North America. In contrast, numerous such examples have been found in Eurasia.

“We're not saying that they didn't occasionally hunt mammoth," said Eren. "But if you can't definitively tell at any single site that Clovis killed that mammoth, then you can't then argue that they overkilled mammoth to extinction.”

“If this were a trial for murder, Clovis murdering mammoths, we'd have to acquit,” he concluded.

Potter, however, disagreed with this statement and called Eren's paper "a highly speculative and polemic piece... that is inconsistent with a wide array of data." In response, Eren alleged that Potter's paper misrepresents previous research produced by Eren and his team and relies on cherry-picked data.

The two studies have been published in Science Advances and the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.