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.
