"Did cavemen REALLY drive wooly mammoths off a cliff?" Topic

One, maybe.
But I have always been annoyed by the science books that said thet Siberians and Native Americns extincted the mammoths and mastodons that way, by driving herds of the hairy beasties off cliffs.
Where is the evidence for that? I hope it has been disuputed by less imaginative experts.

Yes – no – maybe…

link

I do remember the Clovis Indians used spears as blades and cuts have been found in the bones.

I dunno, but Cavewoman's nagging might have driven him off a cliff?

"Well, some hunter Grok is. Call that mammoth? Thak brought his woman BIG mammoth…"

Ironically that's about the only illustration I remember from any of my text books. That… and naked pygmies in national geographics of the same epoch.

Only with great difficulty--early mammoths used a four-speed without a slip differential and a very long clutch.

There's little evidence that primitive man had the slightest idea of ecological balance… There's research on an island off the California coast, where the natives killed off their preferred food source (shellfish), then had to switch to a new diet…

Jeez, John, I thought you were there.

LT

"There's little evidence that primitive man had the slightest idea of ecological balance…"

Ant, then , there is Easter island. Ate everything and cut down all the trees…whoops…no can build boat !

Along similar lines, the whole "lemmings jumping off a cliff" trope is an urban legend cooked up by the Walt Disney Studios: link

So, add lemmings to the animals we've driven off a cliff to their death.

US worker productivity and ingenuity have always been high. Combines killing with tenderizing on an industrial scale. A win-win in neolithic time management. Can be a little messy though; not sure you need bowel contents covering your lunch, and with mad cowasaur or whatever it was called, brains and spinal fluid everywhere can't be good.

Chugwater, Wyoming, is supposed to be another place where the natives drove bison off a cliff.

While the natives clearly understood the strategy of driving animals off cliffs, I would think he nature of the mammoth would have come into play, also. Did they come in herds large enough to shove the leaders forward if they balked at the sight of the cliff? Were they that easy to start stampeding? Might they be just as likely to turn around and trample the hunters?

Grelber

Primitive man only drive mammoth off cliff if man has been drinking.

Not in Holland.

No.

more importantly, does it taste like chicken?

I believe that the broken & shattered bones of multiple mammoths with breaks & damage consistent with falls have been found at the base of cliffs and that many of the bones also have cut marks consistent with being butchered at more than one site. Not conclusive but pretty strong evidence considering there is eye witness testimony of later Indians doing the same with bison.

The whole "living in balance with nature" is one of the big lies. Primitive man was more no less willing to kill off as many prey animals as possible than man at any other time.
They hunted and killed everything the could in a area and then when game got scarce they moved to another are and by the time they got back to the first area it had had time to recover. There was less population so more to to recover. It's like the story that American Indians used every part of the bison that they killed, yes they made things from most all of the parts but they didn't use every part of every bison they killed. You can only use so many spoons made from the horns, and considering that until Europeans brought the horse back to North America the dog travois was the big beast of burden there was only so much they could keep with them. Even after the horse showed up they were limited since they still used the travois.

Why would anyone think it isn't feasible?
Generally, animals run from fire.
-Kle.

There's another buffalo jump in Texas called Bonfire Shelter, on the Rio Grande near Langtry.

First bone bed is supposedly dated to 12,000 B.C.

I recall in High school . One Teacher showed us a article that the US great Plains used to be the great forest . Early man burnt it down as a hunting practice . Set fire and follow behind it eating whatever animal did not get out of way .

There is a site in Jersey (Channel Islands) where Neanderthals stampeded horses off a cliff. I suppose the logic is that if you can do it to horses and bison, you can do it to anything.

However… you don't need to stampede elephants/mammoths off a CLIFF to break their bones. That teeny concrete moat around the elephant enclosure at the zoo is more than deep enough to break the leg bones of any elephant that falls into it. Or indeed tries to jump over it. That's why it's there.

we should devise a way to drive stupid people over a cliff