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There is discussion in this article about why people would have moved these animals over vast distances. But as the Mammoth is in the same family as elephants a
by lowdose 7y ago
There is discussion in this article about why people would have moved these animals over vast distances. But as the Mammoth is in the same family as elephants and I remember elephants choose to die at a location that is revised by their family over time.
Couldn't it be this has been a similar behavior, people coming to a this site and just found 60 remains and build something with it?
- ivan_at_hn 7y agoI don't think so. This finding is just one piece of the big paleolithic complex, which is systematically excavated for a century. Human remains from the complex cover almost twenty thousand years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kostyonki-Borshchyovo_archaeological_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kostyonki-Borshchyovo_archaeol...
- singularity2001 7y agoInteresting. Could still be that paleolithic humans designated an existing mammoth graveyard as a holy site.
- DiffEq 7y agoElephants don't do this...it is a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants%27_graveyard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants%27_graveyard https://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/are-there-really-elephant-graveyards.htm https://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/are-there-rea...
- singularity2001 7y agoMaybe the myth comes from sites like these. And maybe sites like these were used to run down mammoth herds down a cliff: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Kostenky_model.jpg/440px-Kostenky_model.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Ko...
- DiffEq 7y agoPerhaps. I grew up in Montana where they have cliffs like those that the Indians drove bison off of. 10's of thousands at a time...
- jacobush 7y agoI wonder if it's true that the herds of Bison were a result of a an ecosystem in rapid change - supposedly when the natives in North America died and cities and farms went to waste because of disease from the South, introduced by the Europeans. That would have allowed the Bison population to explode.
- catalogia 7y agoIt probably helped the bison at least. Though, so would the plains not being divided up with barbed wire.
- sethammons 7y agoThat doesn't jive with my understanding. The US government went about systematic elimination of indigenous people. Part of that was the elimination of bison as a food source. The population of bison declined from the millions to around a thousand in under a decade arout the 1860s.
- rriepe 7y agoOP is talking about how it got to millions in the first place, a hypothesized peak between two human populations who were suppressing it.
- readarticle 7y agoEuropean states in America went about systematic elimination of the survivors, the pre contact population absolutely dwarfed these remnants and in their time, kept flora and fauna in check across the continent.
- jbattle 7y ago