Logical Flaws in Studies of Pleistocene Carnivore Tooth Wear













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6 Responses to “Logical Flaws in Studies of Pleistocene Carnivore Tooth Wear”

  1. Mike Says:

    Mark, I posted link to your post at Google+ community ‘Life in the Cenozoic Era’.

  2. Mark L Says:

    Mark, do you know how much of a generalist the American lion and the smilodon were? I can’t see a pre-Columbian group eliminate all the different prey items of a generalist carnivore, or the carnivore itself…see coyote and FL pythons as examples, even with all our tech and weapons. On the counter, see how easy it was to starve specialists, even human ones like plains indians with buffalo removal. I guess jag would also be a good generalist also (till guns took them out in NA) .

  3. markgelbart Says:

    Lions and saber-tooths were not generalist carnivores…they required large species of megafauna for sustenance. Native-Americans did completely wipe out mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, horses, Pleistocene species of bison, camels, llamas, and peccaries. (This is the only logical cause of Pleistocene extinction in my opinion.) Isotopic studies suggest saber-tooths and lions excavated from Rancho La Brea mostly relied on horses, bison, and camel–all 3 were wiped out in this region. Later, bison recolonized much of North America.

    Rabbits and a few deer don’t provide enough meat to sustain a viable population of 500 pound cats.

    Coyotes and Burmese pythons are not good analogies for large Pleistocene carnivores. Coyotes under pressure from hunting produce larger litters. That is how they’ve survived the presence of humans. Humans have only been battling pythons in south Florida for a decade. Pythons live in remote inaccessible swamps where humans have difficulty penetrating.

    Plains Indians were not specialists. Homo sapiens are an omnivorous species.

  4. Mark L Says:

    Your comment on the remoteness of terrain for Burmese pythons kind of makes my point that pre-Columbian humans were not able to kill off a widely distributed species (even a large cat) but were only able to eliminate some of it’s prey. Llamas and camels are another example as they ranged in places humans did not easily reach in decent numbers until recently. There is no way for the limited number of humans to eliminate that many ‘hard to reach’ species in that many locations over that time scale unless they were incredibly effecient hunters (and they weren’t). In between the hunts the animals reproduce as usual. Or, there were more people hunting than we thought. Or…something else got them all at once (disease?) and severly took down their numbers (like bats with WNS).
    Admittedly it would take time for a large carnivore (or onmivore) to acclimate to human hunters, but obviously some did (jags, panthers, red wolves, black bears). Whether the others did or didn’t would be a good question to ask. Like we discussed before, hunting a mastodon is not as easy as just jamming a stick in it’s butt and running. If the mastadon knows you are coming, it has some options. That takes a lot of planning and people to address.

  5. markgelbart Says:

    There’s no evidence that llamas or camels ranged into remote places where humans couldn’t reach them until recently. Llamas did survive in the Andes Mountains, but Indians there had a taboo against overhunting them, possibly explaining why they survived there.

    Jaguars and tapirs survived the end Pleistocene extinctions, but some of them lived in remote areas such as jungles and deserts where the population of humans wasn’t very high.

    I don’t recall discussing hunting mastodons with you, but I believe hunting a mastodon was as easy as sticking a spear up its butt and running. There is evidence for exactly that from a fossil site in Venezuela.

    I think the evidence is overwhelming that humans overhunted the megafauna to extinction. Megafaunal populations collapsed exactly the same time that humans colonized North America. Scientists were able to determine this by analyzing the abundance of dung fungus spores in lakes located in New York and Indiana. This collapse does not correspond with any climate change or asteroid impact. Humans began overhunting these beasts about 15,000 years ago, causing an immediate collapse of the populations within 1500 years. Most of the megafauna didn’t become completely extinct until between 11,000 BP-7500 BP. It did take Native Americans about 7500 years to wipe these species out.

    Evidence from studies of dung fungus spore abundance supports a protracted overkill scenario rather than a blitzkrieg model of extinction.

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