So a northern version of the Navajo culture that grew around the buffalo migration. It's a competitor for possibly homo sapiens' oldest profession, eating grass indirectly by following grass-processing devices around and eating them instead.
Are you confusing them with another group? The Navajo/Diné haven't ever been known for Bison hunting. Some of their eastern cousins were early in the Spanish colonial period, but that's not super relevant. They did some trade in the skins and occasional hunting like everyone else in the area, but they were never specialized Buffalo hunters like the Blackfoot.
I hope no one uses that article as a source for anything. Not only does it repeat whole sentences but it also serves up a word salad of mythical origin stories that should not be used as information for anything other than analytical comparisons of Native American origin story permutations.
That link isn't very accurate. For one thing, Navajo are athabascans, as in they speak an Athabascan language. The tribe the language family is named after is in Alaska/Canada though, not Texas.
The massive herds of Bison you're thinking of were primarily a feature of the great plains. Bison existed across much of the rest of the continent, but in much less overwhelming numbers towards the periphery outside the plains. The modern Navajo nation is right on the edge of that historical range. The Sioux (the Lakota among them) are one of the larger ethnolinguistic groups on the plains, along with others like the Blackfoot I mentioned. Here's a rough and highly imperfect map of the "territories":
Also, this is a matter of some disagreement between the ivory tower and many of the Diné themselves, but it's a bit ambiguous to use the term Navajo prior to the Long Walk in the 1870s, when the Bison range had already retreated onto the plains. Navajo prior to that are usually identified much more closely with other Apachean groups. The technical term here is "ethnogenesis".
Before the European invasion, bison ranged from Maine to Florida and Texas to Alberta. We don't know their numbers. Before the invasion, forest cover was kept down across much of the continent by regular burns. After the pandemics were seeded, the burns ceased, and the massive uptake of carbon regrowing the forests caused what is often called a "little ice age". The new forest cover did not favor bison.
We don't know the historical range of Na-Dene or Lakota, or other modern nations; we know only where they were centuries after the aforementioned pandemics wiped out a large majority of all populations across two continents.
The current Pueblo habit of adobe dwellings is suited to their now-confined range. One may reasonably doubt those living in wetter climates used them.
There are bison herds up in Dene territory in Northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories. However to your point, I think they prefer to fish and hunt fowl and caribou.
Humans really are badass. Not only did they kill massive Wooly Mammoths with spears, they would also have had to defend the kill against such predators/scavengers as the bears, wolves, lions, etc.
We “were” badass. In a few generations of progress, we’ve evolved from hunting and eating huge grilled mammoths in family hearing stories; to eating fried small chicken wings alone in the comfort of our homes watching canned TV shows.
What’s next? We can only imagine: eating tiny insect purée from a chewing-machine in the comfort of our shared condo-room, with the A/C at full power
I imagine fire was a key tool in that defense from early on. There are plenty of species that hunt in distinct ways, using tools, traps, etc. But i can’t think of another that has tamed the element of fire like we have. In my mind that was our biggest innovation that lead to many others; basically separating us from the animal kingdom (eventually)
But we're strong as a group; we can achieve medical feats that the these folks wouldn't have even understood. We collectively know more than they ever did. Some of us have stood on the moon.
Back then, all they knew was hunting. Probably became masters at each species and teach the young how to master it.
Now we don’t do that and teach are young about math and science. We don’t need hunting because we can just shoot them in the face. Or drop on nuke on their species.
That's almost certainly wrong. The amount of things they must have known, both individually and collectively, to survive was probably pretty big! They had to know:
- what plants are safe to eat, where to find them, when they come into season.
- what plants are medicinal, and their uses.
- heck, medicine in general. how to treat certain injuries and illnesses, how to help mothers with childbirth.
- navigation, by the stars, by local features, etc.
I have heard this apocryphal idea before: Modern people have to know more to get through a single day than someone from X time period would have learned in their entire lives.
Maybe agriculture didn’t become important to people until large mammals were hunted into extinction and having to rely on smaller game opened an opportunity for agriculture and animal domestication and husbandry.
Large mammals were not, in fact, hunted to extinction. Archaeologists have understood this since the '90s, although Wikipedia has still not caught up.
The North American megafauna, 30+ genera strong, were wiped out by the end-Pleistocene comet strike that caused continent-wide wildfires 12,800 years ago, as recorded in Antarctic and Greenland ice cores. This comet strike coincided with the beginning of the Younger Dryas cold spell, and is suspected of causing it. North America at the time boasted giant sloths, mastodons, mammoths, dire wolves, camels, horses, saber-tooth cats, and beavers, bison and bears much larger than what is left. Their fossils mostly appear right up to the continent-wide black mat of platinum-enriched soot, and not above it.
So those remaining of people who had been making Clovis spear points were obliged to shift to hunting the smaller game that remained, and made the smaller Folsom and other projectile point styles after. The continent-wide uniformity of Clovis points before the strike may have been a consequence of their status as trade goods, where deviation would reduce their value. After, the trade networks may have been disrupted, or maybe smaller points were easier to make, so were less valuable to trade. Most questions will probably never be answered.
Could you share some references, like a recent review or consensus? I've seen different takes on the causes of megafauna extinction, and one story is that the extinction lines up pretty well with the arrival of humans to North America. But recent evidence seems to put the arrival of humans to a few thousand years before the Younger Dryas?
We know there were modern humans in North America 22,000+ years ago. So did hunters go along fine for 9000 years with no impact, and then suddenly, at one stroke, wipe out everything they depended on? It never made any sense even before we knew about the comet strike or earlier arrival. We had lions in Europe right up until the Roman circuses, and still have them and elephants in Africa, and tigers and elephants in India.
There is a good survey article on the status of the end-Pleistocene comet strike by Martin Sweatman. Follow references from there to Antarctic ice cores. (Boslough and Holliday have a great deal to be ashamed of.)
There are all sorts of things that can influence consumption patterns. Change in climate could result in fewer sources of food as drought or inclement stunted certain crops which cascaded into fewer food sources for upstream predators where at the apex we had our fore-bearers who may had decimated populations till there were not enough to sustain the species.
That’s correct based on modern anthropological conclusions
My hypothesis takes that further and shows that it was the biggest cultural change in human history creating the concept of “capital” and is now counter productive to the long term success of humanity
Ask literally any working North American archaeologist. If you are getting your background from YT vids, I recommend Nathanael Fossaaen for broad coverage.
Hunting to extinction is a holdover from "Clovis First" doctrine.
It was not, in fact, "loss of habitats ... and overconsumption". It was, in fact, the comet strike. Habitat increased throughout the period that glaciers were melting, from 20kya to 8kya, opening up basically all of Canada.
That’s taken into account for in acceleration, however megafauna extinction events start 50kya and are confidently correlated with human population increases.
That paper wholly fails to even mention the comet strike, except a single references entry to a 2007 paper. Its heavy reliance on Todd Surovell, a Clovis-first holdout, tells us all we need to know.
We have no reliable data about human population levels in North America, so nothing to correlate to extinctions.
Shouldn't it be the other way around: 'Earliest Alaska hunting camps tied to woolly mammoth movements'?
The article itself states that the camps were set to capitalize on the mammoth movements - 'It looks like these early people were establishing hunting camps in areas that were frequented by mammoths.'
