If only there was a distinctive feature of mammals by which mothers feed their infants and through which the diet of the mother could be inferred, as noted in the article.
"Protein staple". Search the article for 'fat': zero hits. I know there's prejudice for protein over fats, but when we're talking about mammoth meat I'm still amazed at the extent of it. Like calling seal meat a protein. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3885556/
Fair point. I was reacting to the Smithsonian article going like "preferred food source of these early humans: woolly mammoth protein." and how that tracks with other diet talk elsewhere. Hunting higher-fat meats doesn't indicate a preference for protein.
Do humans really miss anything important in their diet when they have to substitute fat with more carbs? As in being a challenge to the multigenerational survival of a community, not as in missing or on national health gains?
A population that is protein-starved will be in real trouble, no matter how plentiful everything else is. I think it makes perfect sense to give special attention to the protein source, even if it's also a major energy supplier with the fat that comes along.
But of course it's well possible that the focus on protein is mostly coincidental, as described in GP's excellent post, and not so much motivated by substitutability. But I'd argue that it's a convenient coincidence.
There's "rabbit starvation"; I've never heard of any corresponding problem on the other end, of "seal starvation" (failing to live on game with a low protein-to-fat ratio). Yes there are healthy food traditions with very high carb intake; my guess is they only became common after the extinction of megafauna, probably mostly because we overhunted them, because they were the favored food.
> The most problematic aspect of the paper is the speed with which it races from a single data point in Montana to humans playing a role in megafaunal extinctions hemisphere-wide,” David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University who was not involved in the work, tells the New York Times.
And while the findings are a “big deal,” as anthropologist Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona, who did not participate in the research, tells Science News, “I don’t know how you could ever test them unless you found more human remains.”
I’ve never been on the paleo diet but from Wikipedia: “The diet avoids food processing and typically includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, and meat and excludes dairy products, grains, sugar, legumes, processed oils, salt, alcohol, and coffee.[2] “
That seems about right to me, apart from avoiding salt. Wikipedia says humans of that time period did eat some grains too.
No. There are many ideas that go into the Paleo diets which have many variations from vegan to pure carnivore, but mostly it is a reaction to some modern engineered foods not being ideal for human digestion. Marshmallows fried in Crisco is not a traditional food and eating such things has unknown effects. The we don't know exactly what people ate or how they cooked it argument has at best meager relevance. We actually have quite a bit of information about that as well as what foods have been recently engineered using modern technology.
It always seemed like a false choice to me. It's not like humans need to literally hunt a species to extinction to wipe it out. We can (and have) done it by disrupting the food chain, altering environments and introducing invasive species as well.
The push back against ancient humans causing or at least, significantly contributing to extinctions feels odd. Few would argue that human activity, even absent hunting or advanced technology, can threaten species today, but for some reason it's considered impossible for ancient peoples.
Ancient humans causing extinctions and environmental change is at odds with the image of "indigenous societies are perfect environmental stewards", which has been popularized for various reasons.
Human predation of mammoths probably contributed to their eventual extinction, but the changing climate almost certainly played a large role as well. If humans hadn’t been around to hunt them they’d probably be extinct anyway. When they finally did go extinct about 4,000 years ago, they were only present on one island way up in the Arctic circle.
Additionally, during the same time period megafauna in Africa have (well, until recently) continued to thrive despite the presence of humans and earlier hominids for millions of years.
The difference is that humans were not native to the Americas, and arrived rather suddenly some tens of thousands of years ago. Meanwhile animals in Africa (and Asia and Europe which were populated much earlier than the Americas) spent much more time co-evolving with humans as predators.
I think your last paragraph contradicts your first one: Most likely, they would not have gone extinct anyway, since similar megafauna in Africa that co-evolved with humans (like elephants) didn’t go extinct despite the climate change.
It makes sense though if their ancestors drove edible species to extinction on arrival, starved for generations while trying to adapt to what they have done, and then ended up with a more sustainable culture afterwards as a reaction.
Not unlike how our current wave of sustainability is a result of ruining our environment.
The presence or absence of wolves in Yellowstone result in quite different ecosystems. It would be hard to see how ancient humans would not similarly alter it.
Generally what's going on with claims of short premodern lifespans is that people are confused over the difference between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at 10 years.
Here's how the logic works: I am stating that a person who clearly has a bone to pick with people who say red meat is bad for you, is misdirecting their ire in a thread about people who ate a lot of red meat 13,000 years ago. If you want to push the expected life expectancy I quoted up by 10-15 years, please do so, I don't mind.
No, they are correct - that is generally what happens when people compare historic life expectancy rates to modern times.
And, people are using 'lifespan' and 'life expectancy' as if they were interchangeable (they're different things).
Your Wikipedia source states up front that the linked research is old and questionable, with the cited paper dating back over 50 years. More recent research, some of it linked here [0], does indeed point to a significantly longer life expectancy.
No idea why Wikipedia is using incorrect 55 yo data for this one; but it does help to prove OP's point further.
So I find this unsurprising because it was what I was always taught growing up.
After a bit of digging it appears that this study is important because:
1. It's direct evidence of mammoth consumption vs the existing evidence of arrow heads and other tools being found alongside of mammoth remains.
2. There's apparently been a growing movement to paint Clovis culture as primarily relying on plants and smaller animals in spite of the existing evidence so this confirms the traditional view.
Yes, it is very abundantly clear that those who prefer the meat high in protein and fat could take over any population which had more of a vegetarian diet.
The most glaring example of this is the Muslim conquest of India which happened primarily because the Muslims had a diet rich in meat and the vegetarian Hindu Indians lacked the necessary protein and fat and so were defeated.
This supports my primary claim that the crash of megafauna caused the creation of property, induced the neolithic societal transition, and set the stage for the unsustainable society we have now - based on fear of scarcity.
How does this fit into a North American context, where many cultures at the point of European contact (i.e. Haudenosaunee, Algonquin, Inuit) practiced communal property? It seems they stayed egalitarian long after the extinction of local megafauna, and in the case of the Haudenosaunee, long after the adoption of agriculture (the Three Sisters).
Another good divulgation article is available at [1].
I think that HN should split karma between previous mentions [2]. This could help better attribute value to contributors whose comments or posts spark further discussion, spreading recognition more evenly. What do others think?
I’ve discussed karma sharing on HN before, and it’s basically not really a bad idea per se but if it’s not broke don’t fix it. The second chance pool is there for things that fall through the cracks. And your post can still get some upvotes. But the real issue to my mind is that HN isn’t really about karma points, so if your post doesn’t do well it’s fine in the grand scheme of things, even in the context of HN. At least other people were able to see the link, even if they didn’t see your post. All roads lead to Rome, anyway.
So your karma number didn’t go up when you did the thing but it did when someone else did the thing. It seems unfair, but it’s almost an anti-feature in that it can disincentivize karma motivated posting behavior. Find something else to post and try again? It’s not worth getting too attached to post traction. The time of posting seems to have more to do with how well a post does than the particular link or who posted it first imo.
When you look at native american bison hunting, it sometimes involved routing a herd to charge itself off a cliff vs actually making the kill by hand which carries a lot of risk.
The next time someone complains about how large the portion sizes are in the US, remind them that Americans were opting for supersize meals 13,000 years ago.
I have wanted to do an ivestigative journalism project to try and understand the disapearance of
almost all of the atlantic salmon, and have all of it filmed in varios canned fish sections in supermarkets,everywhere.
Its almost like there is an invisible apex techno preditor running around or something
Drying meat out over smoke will help to preserve it, as the CO and other emissions and heat will kill off bacteria and slow the growth of new colonies. It's pretty easy to discover by accident- meat that's been overcooked on a wood fire will last longer than meat than meat that isn't.
Other cultures did things like ferment meats and salt cure them, but if you're inland away from easy access to excess salt, it's pretty hard to do that and not get food poisoning.
As others said, smoking and drying are likely, but they could have also buried food the way many canines do. In colder climates, it can be left outside in winter and the colder parts of fall and spring.
I hung out with a native san guy in Namibia who remembers hunting giraffes with bow and arrow with his dad. (he still uses the bow he made)
He said when they killed something that big they would light a signal smoke fire and the entire village would come to the and basically have a party until it was all eaten.
> “The focus on mammoths helps explain how Clovis people could spread throughout North America and into South America in just a few hundred years,”
I never understood this. The colonists walked across the American continent in a couple years. A friend of mine walked from Mexico to Canada in 3 months.
Every new archaeological discovery upends the existing doctrine :-/
There's just too little evidence to make these generalizations. One reason I'd hate to be an archaeologist is there's just frustratingly scant evidence.
Just look at the history of theories about Stone Henge.
Physically speaking they probably walked across the American continent all the time. But it seems easy to rationalise why the culture as an artefact-producing entity would spread slowly. If there are economies of scale to their hunting or economy it would make sense not to wander off too far from existing settlements and mass migrations are sure to be risky and uncomfortable.
Artifacts show that humans in the Americas having been trekking and trading over very long distances for a long time, but the spread of human groups to colonizing different areas was likely much slower and driven by the availability of food and local population levels much more than there being a place to walk to.
83 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] thread(a) zero infants killed and butchered their own mammoth;
(b) the meat from a dead mammoth was not held in reserve for infants.
A population that is protein-starved will be in real trouble, no matter how plentiful everything else is. I think it makes perfect sense to give special attention to the protein source, even if it's also a major energy supplier with the fat that comes along.
But of course it's well possible that the focus on protein is mostly coincidental, as described in GP's excellent post, and not so much motivated by substitutability. But I'd argue that it's a convenient coincidence.
> The most problematic aspect of the paper is the speed with which it races from a single data point in Montana to humans playing a role in megafaunal extinctions hemisphere-wide,” David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University who was not involved in the work, tells the New York Times.
And while the findings are a “big deal,” as anthropologist Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona, who did not participate in the research, tells Science News, “I don’t know how you could ever test them unless you found more human remains.”
The reality: they ate whatever was plentiful in the particular area they were living in.
That seems about right to me, apart from avoiding salt. Wikipedia says humans of that time period did eat some grains too.
It always seemed like a false choice to me. It's not like humans need to literally hunt a species to extinction to wipe it out. We can (and have) done it by disrupting the food chain, altering environments and introducing invasive species as well.
The push back against ancient humans causing or at least, significantly contributing to extinctions feels odd. Few would argue that human activity, even absent hunting or advanced technology, can threaten species today, but for some reason it's considered impossible for ancient peoples.
Additionally, during the same time period megafauna in Africa have (well, until recently) continued to thrive despite the presence of humans and earlier hominids for millions of years.
The difference is that humans were not native to the Americas, and arrived rather suddenly some tens of thousands of years ago. Meanwhile animals in Africa (and Asia and Europe which were populated much earlier than the Americas) spent much more time co-evolving with humans as predators.
Why? They survived greater climatic change/habitat loss before.
Not unlike how our current wave of sustainability is a result of ruining our environment.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over...
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5791021
life expectancy for the 60% reaching age 15 averages 39 remaining years.
So the average expected lifespan of someone who reached 15 years old was 54 years.
Has anyone revisited the question since 1969?
Here's how the logic works: I am stating that a person who clearly has a bone to pick with people who say red meat is bad for you, is misdirecting their ire in a thread about people who ate a lot of red meat 13,000 years ago. If you want to push the expected life expectancy I quoted up by 10-15 years, please do so, I don't mind.
And, people are using 'lifespan' and 'life expectancy' as if they were interchangeable (they're different things).
Your Wikipedia source states up front that the linked research is old and questionable, with the cited paper dating back over 50 years. More recent research, some of it linked here [0], does indeed point to a significantly longer life expectancy.
No idea why Wikipedia is using incorrect 55 yo data for this one; but it does help to prove OP's point further.
0 - https://rewild.com/in-depth/longevity.html
After a bit of digging it appears that this study is important because:
1. It's direct evidence of mammoth consumption vs the existing evidence of arrow heads and other tools being found alongside of mammoth remains.
2. There's apparently been a growing movement to paint Clovis culture as primarily relying on plants and smaller animals in spite of the existing evidence so this confirms the traditional view.
The most glaring example of this is the Muslim conquest of India which happened primarily because the Muslims had a diet rich in meat and the vegetarian Hindu Indians lacked the necessary protein and fat and so were defeated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39569747
I think that HN should split karma between previous mentions [2]. This could help better attribute value to contributors whose comments or posts spark further discussion, spreading recognition more evenly. What do others think?
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2024-12-10/ty-article-ma...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42392286
So your karma number didn’t go up when you did the thing but it did when someone else did the thing. It seems unfair, but it’s almost an anti-feature in that it can disincentivize karma motivated posting behavior. Find something else to post and try again? It’s not worth getting too attached to post traction. The time of posting seems to have more to do with how well a post does than the particular link or who posted it first imo.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_roads_lead_to_Rome
Other cultures did things like ferment meats and salt cure them, but if you're inland away from easy access to excess salt, it's pretty hard to do that and not get food poisoning.
He said when they killed something that big they would light a signal smoke fire and the entire village would come to the and basically have a party until it was all eaten.
[1] https://youtu.be/YfFUbwMXaeg?si=kYnuEAImBwBMPYe9
I never understood this. The colonists walked across the American continent in a couple years. A friend of mine walked from Mexico to Canada in 3 months.
That's a lot of supposing. Different individuals may have different ideas. Some get itchy feet. Some get banned from the community. Some run away.
There's just too little evidence to make these generalizations. One reason I'd hate to be an archaeologist is there's just frustratingly scant evidence.
Just look at the history of theories about Stone Henge.
Calves expected by 2028.