Wild Free and Happy Sample 12

[Note: This is the twelfth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.]

Technological Innovation

When a hungry chimp snatches a small monkey, termite, or bird egg, all she needs to eat it are fingers and teeth.  When a hungry baboon discovers a carcass abandoned by lions, he can chew the meat and fat off the bones and hide.  It’s very different when a persistence hunter chases a large kudu until it is exhausted, and then suffocates it.  What now?  Imagine turning a road kill deer into a feast without a knife.  Have a bloody good time!

Chimps use slender sticks to fish for termites.  They use clubs and rocks to aggressively attack critters that annoy them.  Macaques use stones to smash open shellfish.  Vultures use rocks to open ostrich eggs.  Ravens use gravity to crack open the nuts they drop.  This is not complex technology.

Our ancestors began a transition from found tools to manufactured ones.  The oldest ones discovered so far, mostly simple choppers, were found in Africa, and date to about 2.5 million years ago.  A major advance emerged around 1.5 million years ago — biface knapping.  Some types of rocks, like obsidian or flint, can be carefully knapped to knock off flakes having razor sharp edges.  These were useful as scrapers, knives, and choppers.  Later, ancestors learned how to knap long sharp blades, and attach them to handles.  Still later, they became skilled at chipping flakes into delicately shaped spear points and arrowheads.

We glowing screen people arrogantly smirk at the primitive technology of our early Stone Age ancestors.  In reality, stone tools were revolutionary inventions that shifted the hominin saga onto a new, unusual, and risky path.  For the first time, folks could effectively skin and butcher large animals — an ability that greatly expanded their food resources, and provided high quality nutrients for their jumbo-sized energy-guzzling brains.  Imagine a world in which teeth were the only cutting edges for any purpose.  Civilization would be impossible, and hominins may have never evolved.

Kathy Schick and friends once successfully butchered a dead elephant with stone tools.  A mature adult’s rugged hide is about one inch thick (2.4 cm).  Scavengers like hyenas don’t even bother trying to chew into the carcass of an elephant that recently died.  They let it bake in the sun for a few days, allowing decay to soften it up.

Our ancestors used sharp cutters to remove hides, cut meat off bones, and dismember the carcass into portions easier to haul back to camp.  They used stone hammers to smash open bones, to extract the marrow, which was rich with fat.  Fat is an essential nutrient, and the meat of wild game has only one-seventh of the fat found in supermarket beef, according to Schick.  Ancestors may have scavenged elephant carcasses, but adult pachyderms may not have been prime targets for hunters.  Once you strip the meat off of the exposed side, flipping over a dead elephant is a huge challenge.  Smaller game takes less effort.

We have no idea when spear technology was first developed.  It could have been two or three million years ago.  Wooden artifacts are highly prone to decompose over time.  Spears were also revolutionary.  They made it easier to kill large game, and allowed the ancestors to be less dependent on scavenging.  Spears were also useful for discouraging attacks from man-eating predators.

Thrusting spears, or lances, were driven directly into the prey by hungry hunters, at close range.  Javelins were thrown spears that could kill from a distance, which was much safer.  Carleton Coon mentioned a tribe that could hurl long spears with deadly accuracy from up to 180 feet away (55 m).

The oldest spears found so far were discovered in a coal mine at Schöningen, Germany.  Frederick Coolidge wrote that seven spruce spears, a throwing stick, and other tools were found near ten butchered horse carcasses.  The spears were 400,000 years old, up to 6.5 feet long (2 m), scraped smooth, and pointed at both ends.  They were made by the ancestors of Neanderthals (Homo heidelbergensis).  The fact that Neanderthals could survive for hundreds of thousands of years using such simple weapons is evidence that they lived in a time when large game was abundant, and it was proof that they were not dummies.

The killing power of spears was boosted by the invention of the atlatl, a spear-throwing device that enabled the weapon to be hurled farther and faster.  Alfred Crosby noted that in Peru, an Incan warrior with an atlatl could send a short spear completely through a conquistador wearing metal armor. 

Eventually, nobody is sure when, the bow and arrow was invented.  Like the spear, this deadly technology spread around the world, and over time enabled the slaughter of countless millions of animals.  Of course, with state of the art weaponry, well fed clans grew in number, conflicts increased, and hunters increasingly had to also turn their weapons on strangers who encroached into their territory.

A bloodless alternative to conflict was migration into lands uninhabited by hominin competitors.  Many frontier regions introduced the ancestors to new species of prey, and clever folks invented specialized technology for killing them.  Joe Kane spent time with the Huaorani people of the Amazon rainforest.  Their armory included spears and blowguns.  Poison darts would kill monkeys in the branches above, requiring the hunter to climb up and retrieve them.  Over time, lads who did a lot of tree climbing developed odd-shaped feet.  Their big toes bent outward, providing a tighter grip.

Carleton Coon mentioned other tribes using different poisons that relaxed the muscles of monkeys, so they would fall from the trees.  No climbing needed.  Pygmy poisons were a potion made from ten different plants, beetle larvae, and snake venom.  They paralyzed muscles and stopped the heart.  In Japan, the Ainu built booby traps, in which deer tripped on a cord, and a bow shot a poison tipped arrow into the animal. 

When marine mammals were speared, their corpses often sank into deep waters, never to be retrieved and consumed.  The solution was to carve barbed detachable harpoon heads which would not pull out of the animal’s flesh.  The embedded head was attached to a cord linked to the hunter above.  When the dead animal sank, it could then be retrieved and invited to lunch.

Innovation also led to the use of rock-throwing slings, bolas, hunting nets, traps, and on and on.  You could fill a book on this subject, and Alfred Crosby did, covering the entire spectrum from rocks to nuclear weapons.  Humans are remarkably creative when it comes to devising an endless stream of new and improved systems for killing things.  It’s been a nonstop arms race.

The wheels of innovation spin faster when populations grow, and become able to support more and more nerdy specialists.  Also, trade with other regions brings distant groups into contact, where they are exposed to the gizmos and ideas from other cultures, and this can greatly stimulate the imaginations of anxious nerds.  The velocity of change in my lifetime has been dizzying, impossible to keep up with.

Craig Dilworth described what he called the Vicious Circle Principle (VCP), a cycle in which (1) scarcity spurred technological innovation, (2) innovation increased access to more resources, (3) more resources increased consumption, (4) increased consumption fueled population growth, (5) population growth led to resource depletion, and (6) resource depletion led to scarcity once again. 

The VCP cycle keeps repeating, each time ratcheting up the impact, until it eventually slams into firm resource limits, or chokes to death on its own pollution.  Some hunter-gatherer cultures managed to survive into recent times in a low impact manner — until the radicalized VCP mob barged into their world via loggers, miners, missionaries, and so on.

Dilworth noted that, from its beginning, technological development has degraded ecological sustainability.  Should we be proud of our legendary wizardry?  Species that don’t manufacture tools, like chimps, never experience this predicament.  Our current technological utopia, swarming with billions of hominins, continues to work tirelessly to destroy the ecological basis upon which it depends, a one-way dead-end path.  How smart is that?

Evolution is brilliant!  When predators are free to perform their natural ecosystem services, their prey do not experience population outbursts.  Chimps make no effort to exterminate the big cats that prey on them, consequently there are not seven billion chimps pounding the stuffing out of the planet.  The sacred dance of predator and prey works beautifully until it gets blindsided by technological innovation.  Technology improved our abilities at offence (killing game) as well as defense (exterminating competing predators).  Balance got blown out of the water.

Dilworth mentioned that by 200 B.C. the leopards and lions of Greece, and along the coast of the Near East, were gone.  Several centuries later, tigers no longer survived in northern Persia and Mesopotamia.  Predator extermination is a standard process in cultures that enslave domesticated animals.  Today, few wild high-level predators survive in most of the civilized world.

Environmentalists tend to focus their campaigns primarily on problems related to modern technology, because they think it’s especially terrible.  Dilworth’s VCP sees all technology as dangerous and unnecessary.  Across Eurasia and the Americas, megafauna extinctions surged between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago — in the Stone Age, prior to agriculture and civilization, when fewer than ten million humans likely wandered the Earth.  It was an enormous ecological holocaust that our culture has largely swept under the rug.  Today, few consumers wake up screaming from nightmares about the bloody extermination of mastodons, saber-tooth cats, or woolly rhinos by high-tech hunters.  We are also careful not to think about the mass extinctions happening right now, as we pedal to work.

The bottom line for Dilworth is that if technological development was truly wisdom-driven, intelligent, and beneficial, it would not have transformed the planet’s healthy genuinely sustainable wild ecosystems into toxic devastated wastelands, depleted countless precious resources, and sabotaged the climate.  Why do we continue proudly teaching children about our magnificent big brains and the wonders of progress?  The good news is that the VCP cycle is unsustainable, and will eventually blink out.  What will be left when it does?

Hunters of the Recent Past



 

When I hear the word “hunter,” I immediately conjure an image of a man with a gun.  Other images follow — bows and arrows, mounted hunters, cavemen with spears, and so on.  Hunters of the Recent Past provided me with much new information on how the ancestors lived, prior to horses, guns, and other industrial gizmos.  The book is a collection of 19 scholarly papers that describe modes of low-tech communal hunting that were common during the last 8,000 years or so.

Evolution fine-tuned our species for life on tropical savannahs.  In a hot climate, meat spoils quickly, so hunting was only done to satisfy immediate needs.  Tropical folks could survive without fire and clever technology.  On the other hand, in temperate and subarctic climates, the buffet of food resources was less generous.  In many regions, survival through long winters was impossible without having fire, warm shelter, fur clothing, and substantial amounts of stored food.

On the western plains of North America, a common method of communal hunting was driving herds of buffalo off cliffs.  White folks called these killing sites buffalo jumps, the Blackfeet called them pishkuns.  Pishkuns were scattered from Canada to Mexico.  There were more than 300 in Montana alone.  For thousands of years, prior to horses and guns, this was a primary method for hunting buffalo.  At the First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park in Montana, many layers of buffalo bones are found beneath the cliff — literally millions of bones.

When scouts observed a herd moving into the vicinity of a pishkun, hunters moved to appropriate locations, and became noisy and animated.  The herd panicked and ran away from them, moving into drive lanes that funneled the herd to the brink of doom.  Brave teenage buffalo runners, camouflaged in buffalo hides, led the animals toward the cliff.  The runners would disappear over the edge, but safely land on a ledge below, whilst the surprised buffalos flew over them, and plummeted to the rocks below, where butchers waited.  (Read THIS.)

The Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is in southwest Alberta.  It utilized one of the longest and most complex drive structures on the plains.  Natives constructed drive lanes that reached up to 6 miles (10 km) into the gathering basin.  They followed the contours of the land, to help the flow of animals move as smoothly as possible.  The bone deposits at the bottom are 39 feet deep (12 m).  This pishkun was in use by at least 6,000 years ago.  (Read THIS.)

In the journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Lewis noted that on May 29, 1805 they discovered the rotting carcasses of about 100 buffalo at the bottom of a cliff, as well as great numbers of well-fed wolves that were “very gentle.”  For amusement, Clark felt inspired to shoot one of the blissed out wolves.

There were two primary seasons for communal hunting, springtime and late autumn/early winter.  In spring, little stored food was left.  Buffalo still had heavy winter coats, excellent for making warm clothing.  In the fall, animals had fattened up for the long cold winter, and fat was cherished.  Animals with minimal fat were junk food, or dog food, or left to rot.

Reindeer live in northern Eurasia, and caribou live in Greenland, Canada, and Alaska.  The two creatures are the same species (Rangifer tarandus), but there are nine subspecies, like tundra reindeer, woodland reindeer, tundra caribou, woodland caribou, etc.  Several are now endangered.  The species is unique in that both sexes grow antlers.

All around the Arctic Circle, reindeer and caribou have been hunted for thousands of years.  They provide meat, sinew for sewing, bone for needles and awls, antler for tools, fat for light, heating, and nourishment, and hides for bags, snares, clothes, and tents.  They make survival possible.

Every spring and fall, herds made seasonal migrations along traditional routes.  Hunters knew when and where to expect them.  These routes often had bottlenecks that concentrated the herds, ideal locations for hunting.  Commonly, groups of hunters would drive the herds into killing places.  To direct the movement of a herd, drive lanes included barriers — log fences, brush fences, snow drifts, rock cairns.  Some locations had corrals of wood or stone to capture the herd.  In Siberia, animals were driven into nets.

Herds were driven into deep snow and then lanced or shot with arrows.  In Greenland, caribou were driven off cliffs.  Some hunters used snares, open loops suspended from branches, to grab animals by their necks or antlers.  Snares were placed along game trails, where animals voluntarily moved, or scattered along drive lanes where hunters or dogs aggressively drove them.  Records from 250 years ago report that near Churchill, Manitoba, caribou herds were driven into corrals that were one mile (1.6 km) in diameter, and 350 to 600 people participated in the kill.

The easiest method, where possible, was to drive the herd into streams or lakes, where they were lanced by hunters in canoes or kayaks.  Two hundred animals could be taken in a few hours.  During a two-week summer hunt on Lake Mistinipi, hunters speared 1,200 to 1,500 caribou.  One Copper Inuit settlement, inhabited between 1500 and 1700, was located close to a caribou migration route.  During two centuries, an estimated 100,000 caribou were driven into the lake and killed.

Lads in canoes did not always stop killing when they had all the meat they needed.  In a frenzy, they killed as many caribou as they could, the entire herd, if possible.  It was a great pleasure to kill so easily, many months since the last migration.  Near Hudson Bay, an observer in the 1890s found hundreds of carcasses left to rot — overkill.

In Scotland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, many thousands of pit traps were dug in migration routes to catch reindeer.  Animals could be driven into the pits during their outbound and inbound migrations.  In southern Norway, trapping pits were used as early as 11,000 years ago.  HERE are examples of snares and traps used in Stone Age Finland.  HERE are photos of recreations of a settlement in Stone Age Finland.

Caribou herds had been following traditional migration routes for 8,000 years or more.  Indians and Inuit built permanent settlements along the routes.  In the nineteenth century, when hunters began using repeating rifles, animals could be killed from farther away, requiring less stalking skill.  The caribou harvest sharply increased.  Before long, herds abandoned traditional routes, communities starved, and their settlements went extinct — an unintended consequence of progress.

The book also discusses communal hunting for pronghorn antelope, mountain sheep (bighorns), mammoths and mastodons, moas, guanacos, and others.  It’s a mother lode of information.  The writing is scholarly — terse and compact — but not bewildering techno jargon gibberish.

Compared to the good old days in mother Africa, it was far more difficult for tropical primates to survive in cool climates.  The selection of kill sites, and the construction of drive lanes, corrals, and pit traps was a major effort.  On the days of mass kills, large numbers of people were required for success.  Preserving meat and hides took weeks of work.

Communal hunting required teamwork, planning, and extensive knowledge of the landscape, the behavior of animals, and basic survival.  Over time, it contributed to the extinction of mammoths, mastodons, and moas.  By the 1930s, mountain sheep were nearly gone.  With the arrival of guns, horses, traders, snowmobiles, ranchers, loggers, miners, diseases, and genocidal maniacs, the herds of buffalo, caribou, and reindeer have been sharply reduced.

In another review (HERE), we learned that the persistence hunters of the Kalahari, and their hominid predecessors, remained extremely low tech for two million years or more.  The civilized people who have waged full-scale war on wildlife are all descendants of persistence hunters.  Technological innovation is demonically addictive, new gizmos replacing old, in an accelerating downward spiral.  Cultures bewitched with cleverness gallop down the drive lanes, faster and faster and faster, destined for the bloody bone beds below — big brains and all.  There are other paths.

Davis, Leslie B., and Brian O. K. Reeves, editors, Hunters of the Recent Past, Unwin Hyman, London, 1990.