Instead of Thrown, Spears Were Planted in the Ground to Kill a Charging Mammoth
Instead of Thrown, Spears Were Planted in the Ground to Kill a Charging Mammoth
Researchers recreate Ice Age hunting techniques to show that spears were probably braced against the ground rather than thrown at massive mammoths.
i remember reading how eskimos would wrap sharp bone fragments in balls of fat and leave them for polar bears.. then they would follow the bears until they died of internal bleeding.
elephants are much smarter than bears though.
69Isnt there a similar thing where they put a blood soaked knife in the snow blade up and a wild wolf will come and lick the blood off, cutting their tongue on the blade and keep lapping at it not realising its their blood until they pass out.
11Elephants (and mammoths probably) are also herbivores that chew their food. Sometimes that food is a whole tree. Using the polar bear sharp bone strategy would be like feeding a razor blade to a wood chipper.
11
Pikes were used much the same way right? Surprised I never put the two together, ancient humans weren't stupid so of course they'd realize that was a better way of causing harm than just throwing it. Not to mention their use of leverage in weapons like the Atlatl. No clue on the timespan of these things but I do find this stuff interesting.
54I'm sure so much of our history is more or less completely unknowable simply because the remains all degraded quickly.
How many things made out of wood that simply rotted away, or burned or any one of a thousand things.
Stone tools were a game changer in every sense.
22The Clovis period was around 12,000 years ago in North America.
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Makes sense, use the prey's weight and momentum to do the hard work, rather than the relativly feable arm of a much smaller creature!
34Many people have a silly idea in their heads that stone-age humans could not be as innovative and smart as we can because their technology was less advanced than ours.
They also look at an expertly-knapped spearhead like the ones in the thumbnail and think they could do that with a couple of rocks they find in their backyard.
These ancestors of ours were smart, they were creative thinkers, they made stone tools at an expert level that the average person today could not even hope to replicate. I love finding out new ways they were able to innovate.
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The grooves carved into each point could allow it to slide down the shaft upon impact. A fixed point, by contrast, would be more likely to shatter when it hit dense material, especially bone.
This is really interesting. And to further illustrate just how much we have no idea and might be wildly wrong, there's an incredible book, All Yesterdays, which reimagines prehistoric animals in interesting new ways. The second half of the book shows possible recreations of contemporary animals based solely on their skeletons to really drive home the point at how much guessing is involved in this field. Some of the images can be found here.
This is a rhino skeleton (wtf):
14We do know a lot more about mammoths though, because they have been found frozen in good condition in Siberia.
13There were some cave lions found several years ago, too. Cubs.
5
Fuckin bullshit. I’ve seen the cave paintings - they were throwing those fuckers
13How do you think they got the mammoth to run into the trap of spears? Also, in case it turned towards you, you'd want a spear in your hands to make him turn.
Edit: judging by the picture in the post, if you couldn't run away, you might jam the back end into the ground beside/behind yourself and hold up the point so at least he'd be wounded when he squashed you
12You're all wrong. It was a, "Mr. Mastodon, you dropped your spears!" situation.
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As far as I know, the Clovis people did not make cave paintings and the people who did make cave paintings didn't hunt mammoths.
4Reallllyyy. That's pretty interesting.
2Is this the Mandela effect here? Are not all of the cave paintings and cave drawings I've ever seen ones of cave peoples throwing spears at wooly mammoths? Have we been Swiftboated by cave people? Stolen cave valor?
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Could you just imagine killing an animal that size with a big stick? I'd tell everyone I met, probably multiple times.
12Everyone you'd met was probably with you at the time. So their response would be, "yeah we know. Shut up about that mammoth already. It's been two weeks and we have to go kill another mammoth."
23So if the theory is that spears were planted in the ground rather than thrown, that means there was probably a ton of them in the ground and mammoths were chased into the trap.
5Planted in the ground could mean that they were left free standing or that they held the backend against the ground whilst holding onto it still.
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I always pictured mammoths being more docile: disinclined to charge. Didn't realize they could be more of a wooly bully.
10Elephants charge pretty easily, so that part doesn't surprise me.
18Wooly bully?
6Watch it now, watch it!
6
Prehistoric lego.
6I would be surprised if they didn't use pitfall traps with spikes. That's how I would take down an elephant
5I believe that's a tiger trap
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Isnt this how you would hunt boar too?
4This is probably how you hunt nearly everything which is faster than you as long as you don't have the means to kill it with one shot.
8
Prehistoric Minecraft Automatic Mob Farm.
4It was the first Olympic sport...run from.the Mammoth
3Well yes, obviously.
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