1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [91]
Not everyone was convinced by Martin’s model. Paleontologists noted that many non-game species vanished, too, which in their view suggests that the extinction wave was more likely due to the abrupt climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene; Martin pointed out that previous millennia had experienced equally wild shifts with no extinction spasm. In addition, similar extinctions occurred when human beings first invaded Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, and the Polynesian Islands.
Despite overkill’s failure to enjoy full acceptance, it helped set in stone what became the paradigmatic image of the first Americans. Highly mobile, scattered in small bands, carnivorous to a fault, the paleo-Indians conjured by archaeologists were, above all, “stout-hearted, daring, and voracious big-game hunters,” in the skeptical summary of Norman Easton, an anthropologist at Yukon College, in Whitehorse. Clovis people were thought to have a special yen for mammoth: great ambulatory meat lockers. Sometimes they herded the hairy creatures en masse into gullies or entangling bogs, driving the animals to their doom with shouts, dogs, torches, and, possibly, shamanic incantations. More often, though, hunters stalked individual beasts until they were close enough to throw a spear in the gut. “Then you just follow them around for a day or two until they keel over from blood loss or infection,” Charles Kay, an ecological archaeologist at Utah State University, told me. “It’s not what we think of as sporting, but it’s very effective and a hell of a lot safer than hand-to-hand combat with a mammoth.”
Shifting location to follow game, the Clovis people prowled roughly circular territories that could have been two hundred miles in diameter (the size would vary depending on the environmental setting). With any luck, the territory would contain flint, jasper, or chalcedony, the raw material for spear points, meat scrapers, and other hunting tools. Bands may have had as many as fifty members, with girls going outside the group to marry. At camp, women and girls made clothes, gathered food—wild plums, blackberries, grapes—and tended babies. Men and boys went hunting, possibly as a group of fathers and sons, probably for days at a time.
As the extinctions proceeded, the Clovis people switched from mammoths to the smaller, more numerous bison. The spear points grew smaller, the hunting more systematic (with prey becoming scarcer, it needed to be). Bands camped on ridges overlooking ponds—the men wanted to spot herds when they came to drink. When the animals plunged their muzzles into the water, hunting parties attacked, forcing the startled bison to flee into a dead-end gully. The beasts bellowed in confusion and pain as the paleo-Indians moved in with jabbing spears. Sometimes they slaughtered a dozen or more at once. Each hunter may have gobbled down as much as ten pounds of bison flesh a day. They came back staggering under the load of meat. Life in this vision of early America was hard but pleasant; in most ways, archaeologists said, it was not that different from life elsewhere on the planet at the time.
Except that it may not have been like that at all.
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
In the early 1980s a magazine asked me to report on a long-running legal battle over Pacific Northwest salmon. A coalition of Indian tribes had taken Washington State to court over a treaty it had signed with them in 1854, when the state was still part of the Oregon Territory. In the treaty, the territory promised