Cannibals and Kings Read Online Free PDF Page B

snails, acorns, pistachios and other nuts, wild legumes, and wild grains. Kent Flannery of the Universityof Michigan has called this system “broad spectrum” hunting and collecting. The retreat of the glaciers and the intensification of big-game hunting did not have precisely the same consequences in Europe and the Middle East, but both regions probably suffered similar environmental depletions which raised the costs of obtaining animal proteins. According to Karl Butzer, most of Turkey, northeastern Iraq, and Iran were treeless during the last ice age, and this would have facilitated the hunting of herd animals. True, the reforestation that occurred at the end of the glacial period was not as extensive as in Europe, but this may actually have made the ecological crisis in the Middle East more severe because of a deficit of both open-country and forest species.
    Turning to North and South America, one can see the same process at work. The terminal phase of the last ice age represented the peak of specialized big-game hunting in the New World. At sites in Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Idaho, and Nevada archaeologists have found beautifully crafted leaf-shaped projectile points, blades, and burins dating from 13,000 to 9000 B.C. , some of which are associated with extinct species of antelope, horses, camels, mammoth, mastodon, giant ground sloths, and giant rodents. Between 11,000 and 8000 B.C. big-game hunters equipped with fluted and channeled points were active over a wide expanse of North America, but by 7000 B.C . predation and the climatological changes brought about by the receding glaciers had resulted in the total extinction of thirty-two whole genera of large New World animals including horses, giant bison, oxen, elephant, camels, antelope, pigs, ground sloths, and giant rodents.
    Paul C. Martin of the University of Arizona has suggested that the ancestors of the American Indians killedoff all of these large animals—called collectively the “Pleistocene Megafauna”—in one short burst of intense predation. Martin attributes this rapid extinction to the fact that the animals had never been hunted by human beings prior to the arrival of bands of Siberian migrants who crossed the Bering Straits land bridge 11,000 years ago. We now know, however, that the discovery of America by migrants from Asia took place much earlier—at least 15,000 and possibly even 70,000 years ago. Although Martin’s overall theory is thus disproven, his idea of rapid extinction deserves careful consideration. Using a computer program to simulate various kill rates practiced by a small initial human population, Martin has shown that all the big animals from Canada to the Gulf Coast could have been wiped out in three centuries if the hunters had permitted their own population to double each generation—a rate of growth well within the reproductive capacity of paleolithic hunters.
    We introduce 100 Paleoindians at Edmonton. The hunters take an average of 13 animal units per person per year. One person in a family of four does most of the killing, at an average rate of one animal unit per week.…
    The hunting is easy; the [band] doubles every 20 years until local herds are depleted and fresh territory must be found. In 120 years the Edmonton population grows to 5,409. It is concentrated on a front 59 miles deep at a density of 0.37 persons per square mile. Behind the front, the megafauna is exterminated. By 220 years, the front reaches northern Colorado … in 73 years, the front advances the remaining 1,000 miles [to the Gulf of Mexico], attains a depth of 76 miles, and reaches a maximum of just over 100,000 people. The front does not advance more than 20 miles in one year. In 293 years thehunters destroy the megafauna of 93 million animal units.
    Martin’s scenario remains useful as an illustration of the vulnerability of large, slow-breeding species to hunter-collectors who decide to increase their kill rates as a result of reproductive