The Great Extinction: Human Impact on Pleistocene Mammals
Chapter 6: The Great Extinction
A Strong Sex or Both Sexes Strong?
The Dilemma of Man vs. Woman Hunter-Gatherers
When comparing the human life cycle and ages of life with those of our closest living relatives, there are significant differences. Female chimpanzees are virtually fertile until the day they die.
Scientists think that menopause occurred so mothers could help their daughters raise their grandchildren; this is called the “Grandmother Hypothesis.” On the other hand, the Grandmother Hypothesis can only work if daughters stay near their mothers into adulthood and do not migrate. Among chimpanzees, females migrate to reach sexual maturity and lose contact with their mothers.
The Search
Even with plant products, humans cannot sustain themselves in markedly seasonal ecosystems such as those of Europe and much of Asia, nor in a warm period like the present, let alone during glaciations. The meat and fat of animals had to be an indispensable resource for human survival in our latitudes and further north.
Hunters or Scavengers?
We have seen that prehistoric men of high latitudes would necessarily rely on a complete diet for carnivore inputs of vegetable calories. In most cases, humans had access to meat from the bodies before the carnivores did, as the marks of their teeth overlap the traces of human-made starkly with bifaces; traces are thus above. The conclusion is that humans were hunters and scavengers.
Schöningen Lances
The Schöningen deposit is about 100 km east of Hanover. To date, Hartmut Thieme has found four preserved spears in Schöningen. These spears are made from trunks of young spruce trees (not branches). Hartmut Thieme thinks they were designed to be fired, or javelins that were more spades. At the site of Schöningen, abundant remains of horses, which also show marks of cutting and descarnación, have been found in the lakeside 400,000 years ago.
Elephant Hunting in the Highlands
In villages, many remains have been found associated with fossil elephant bifaces and other stone tools. Many researchers have believed that elephants were hunted by humans sometime after the age of Schöningen spears. Other scientists think that the deposits have been misinterpreted and that the elephant hunting scenes so often reproduced never took place.
The first modern humans in Europe were Aurignacians. The explanation for this decrease in strength may be in the appearance on the stage of searching for new and deadly weapons: the propeller and a bow and arrow. These revolutionary ways to kill at a distance (the propeller and the arch) undoubtedly changed the balance between humans and their prey. This ended up in the extinction of numerous species of mammal mammals: the first human being would be generating a ecological impact of large scale; it would therefore not a sin unique to modern industrial societies.
The Recent Mammoth
Woolly mammoths are perhaps the most emblematic animals of the Ice Age, the Pleistocene. When it finished and began the Holocene, the woolly mammoths vanished forever with the megaceros, woolly rhinos, and cave bears. Their disappearance was dated back 12,000 years ago in Europe, 11,000 years in North America, and 10,000 years in northern central Siberia, apparently their last refuge following the retreat of the ice. Russian authors favor the theory that the mass extinction of mammoths in the late Pleistocene was due to climate change that affected plants which feed on its ecosystem of steppe/tundra.