Prehistoric life and mammoth hunting.

My characters are hunting mammoths, and I don't really know much about them (or hunting). Even descriptions of megafauna hunts in general would be appreciated. I also need a resource for prehistoric life in cold climates, because my Google-fu doesn't seem to be up for the task. Example: I don't care that ice age humans used permafrost to store meat, I care about what kind of permafrost, where it could be found, how long the meat was stored, etc.

(Information on modern hunter-gatherers is welcome too, but I don't think there are many left in cold climates).

 

The movie Quest for Fire may help you out.

They would likely not keep meat for very long and if they did smoking it would probably be how they did it, not burying it.

One thing to remember about that time in our history is that we weren't alone. There is evidence that "camp wolves" had already evolved. They weren't being selectively bred yet, but were wolves that were tame. This provided night time security because the dogs would make noise and allow humans to ready their fire and weapons. This would allow humans to become less worried about security and allowed them to tell stories at night. Wolves were the dominate predators in the continent, both in numbers and strength so camp wolves would be in large numbers too.

 

Anyone who has hunted with modern weapons will find hunting with stone tools extremely difficult. I don't think you are going to find much detail on Google on this one, so use your imagination, and also talk to someone who hunts, on the difficulty of tracking and approaching prey, the tricks they use.

Cartoons of cavemen swarming around a herd of mammoth that you see in most depictions of hunts would probably result in a lot of broken spears, and dead or injured cavemen. Some serious suggestions that I have seen, and can't cite, are driving them into a narrow ravine, where another group throws big rocks down on them. Believe there was such a mass killing site found in the northern US a few years ago, though I think it was bison. Another is opportunistic hunting, and I believe there is archaeological evidence for this, a mammoth bogged down in the mud, unable to extricate itself. Hunters can then climb on its back and bash its head in with a rock. How you get up on a mammoth's back with a big enough rock, when the mammoth doesn't want you up there, is an exercise for the persuasive writer! Also, at that point, since the mammoth can't charge them, they may be able to close in and use spears. Or big rocks at close range.

And don't forget carcasses of freshly dead mammoths. Carrion is not half bad if not too rotten and properly cooked, and a lot less risky.

Mammoth hide, like elephant hide, is very thick and tough. Google up to find out how thick elephant hide is, and see if you can find descriptions of Africans hunting elephants with spears... the techniques will be similar, though the spears will be far superior.

I would expect smaller mammals like deer, squirrel, birds, etc. would make up the bulk of their protein, and that might be a luxury. Birds can be caught with nets. No arrows, but throwing sticks like boomerangs would probably fit the bill.

 

1/ The mammoth is so hairy because where it lived was cold...so wouldn't go bad as fast as in the tropics. Plus, if you're hungry enough, you'll take a chance on food poisoning! (No health and safety nannies around!)

2/ Yes! I would imagine bashing a mammoth braincase in with a rock wouldn't be feasible. You're going to have to find a way of getting something pointy into somewhere delicate...which probably entails catching the mammoth when immobilised. Or getting it to fall into a pit full of sharp stakes - although that needs a LOT of organisation to remove that much soil - a Pleistocene mammoth weighed around 6 tonnes and would have a specific gravity of slightly less than 1; a similar volume of soil would have a SG of anywhere up to 3 times as much, so at least 20 tonnes, probably closer to 100 tonnes to make room for it to miss the sides! And digging it out is only the start, you've then got to cart it away (with no wheelbarrows - no wheels yet!) far enough that you don't alert the target audience. And in order to put in that amount of work, you'd need a fair guarantee that a mammoth was going to fall into it...and enough notice of it happening.

3/ Wiki dates the bow as being introduced around 10k BC...and then cites "The oldest extant bows in one piece are the elm Holmegaard bows from Denmark which were dated to 9,000 BCE" and "Microliths discovered on the south coast of Africa suggest that arrows may be at least 71,000 years old."

So, no reason why ice age man wouldn't have bows, as long ago as Neanderthal times.


Elaine Morgan's Aquatic Ape hypothesis suggests that we evolved more as fishermen than hunters; presumably when we spread out from Africa and started having to wear clothing against the cold, going swimming became less practical.

 

I majored in anthro! I got your back on this one!

Honestly, from what I learned in the college, human hunting/gathering isn't as glorious as the modern day pretends it is. For the most part, early humans were scavengers. Our bodies have developed to allow us to walk very long distances with very little effort. This facet of our biology is how we 'hunted'. For the most part, the animals we wanted to munch on ran out of energy long before we did. Allow me to direct your attention to the following aggrandized story:

Picture the cold plains of north America. A heard of buffalo graze idly on the hillside. Everyone is happy.
Suddenly, a spear thrown by an atlatl lands in the flank of a buffalo. The buffalo screams a deep, manly roar. Then the whole heard charges off. Up over the hill, stampeding away, until at last they settle a mile or two down the plain.
The buffalo is injured, but nothing major. It'll have a small limp, but it'll survive. It's strong like ox.
But who should appear over the hillside a few hours later than a group of bipedal humans. They walk on up to the buffalo, throwing spears which may or may not land. The buffalo scatter, use all their energy to stampede away again.
But the humans are relentless. By now the buffalo are tired. They're large animals, they require lots of grazing time to sustain their energy. Also, the running and stampeding have agitated the pre-existing wounds. The buffalo have lost blood. They NEED a day or two's rest.
Humans don't give a fuck.
Up over the ridge they walk totally normal, totally nonchalant, with their human-legs that require little to no energy to move long distance. Almost like they were designed for bipedal movement.
This time, when the buffalo tries to run, the spear injuries and absolute exhaustion take their toll. The buffalo proves an easy target for a few more well placed atlatl spears, and is brought down. It can only breath heavily and watch with its buffalo eyes as the humans surround it, prepping their jagged stone axes.

We literally out-paced the animals we followed around. Early man just walked around behind herds of animals, waiting for one of them to mess up. We're like the compsognathus of the mammal world.

 

The Mammoth Hunters by Jean M Auel has, unsurprisingly, at least one big mammoth hunt in it. In excruciating detail.

 

Humans are the planet's best distance runners, by a very very large margin. Ancient hunters were more likely to simply run tire big prey down than try to attack it. A bison or mammoth would almost certainly run if chased by a human with fire, even more likely if they have dogs with them. There are still tribes in Africa that employ this tactic. Deer are way faster than humans, they can easily get a hundred yards from a dangerous human after a quick sprint. The problem is that humans will not stop, they'll run after you slowly, but they can keep it up for hours, and they work in packs. We're not ambush predators like big cats, we don't mind taking our time and slowly injuring and tiring our meal. Our ancestors probably tracked their prey, scared it away, tracked it, scared it, over and over again until the prey was too tired to put up much of a fight.

 

So what you're saying is that zombies are to us what we are(were) to our prey?

 

That is a hilariously apt comparison.

 

Almost criminally so.

 

I can't press like more than once.

 

Seems like a pretty apt analogy.

 

I knew we were an excellent animal, but this surprised me:

Our "sustainable distance" is also hard to beat. African hunting dogs typically travel an average of 10 kilometers a day. Wolves and hyenas tend to go about 14 and 19 kilometers, respectively. In repeated distance runs, horses can cover about 20 kilometers a day. Vast throngs of human runners, by comparison, routinely run 42.2-kilometer marathons in just a few hours, and each year tens of thousands of people complete ultra-marathons of 100 kilometers and longer. (A few animals can match that under special circumstances. Huskies can trot up to 100 kilometers in Arctic conditions when forced to by people. But in warmer climes—no way.)

And another section from the article is more on-topic (and supporting above contributions):

But how did we get this way? After all, our brainy, tool-using ancestors could have just sneaked up on prey animals and brought them down with a spear or arrow. Why did evolution shape us as great distance runners?

The answer, argue Lieberman and Bramble, is that snares, nets, and really effective projectile weapons, such as the bow and arrow, were probably invented by Homo sapiens—modern humans. There's no evidence that early Stone Age hunters had weapons much better than sharp sticks. Such armaments would have required them to kill prey animals at close quarters, where they would have been at high risk of getting fatally gored, bitten, or kicked. Thus, they probably obtained meat mainly via "persistence hunting"—chasing an antelope, for instance, until it was nearly keeling over with heat exhaustion—and scavenging. The latter was very much a running game: When distant, circling vultures tipped them off about a lion kill, they had to get there before hyenas, which strip everything edible from carcasses. And they typically could only outrace hyenas in the hot sun. As a result, they carved out a new carnivore niche: the hot-day meat chaser.

Intriguingly, existing hunter-gatherers still sometimes resort to persistence hunting in hot weather. That's because the nutritional payoffs can greatly exceed the energy costs of running down meat for us fleet-footed types. In fact, our ancestors' meat-rich diets probably contributed to the evolution of modern human traits, such as small guts, small teeth, and big brains.

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/06/long_distance_running_and_evolution_why_humans_can_outrun_horses_but_can_t_jump_higher_than_cats_.html