5 ms·

Specifically one Clovis infant, this has some responses https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/an-ice-age-infants-bones-reveal-early-americans-ate-woolly-mam

• thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Something tells me that (a) zero infants killed and butchered their own mammoth; (b) the meat from a dead mammoth was not held in reserve for infants.
  • votepaunchy 2y ago
    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.
  • tohnjitor 2y ago
    maybe they did save specific foods for infants.
    • ceejayoz 2y ago
      Probably not entire mammoths, though.
      • pests 2y ago
        Infants usually drink milk no?
        • ceejayoz 2y ago
          At eighteen months? Not exclusively.
    • gweinberg 2y ago
      well, there is one food that is primarily consumed by infants. Maybe you meant they saved special food for nursing mothers?
      • tohnjitor 2y ago
        Indeed. Good point
  • 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
    Where's your evidence that infants didn't hunt and butcher mammoths? I need you to write me a dissertation before I believe this claim.
    • rgrieselhuber 2y ago
      And it has to be peer-reviewed.
      • perrygeo 2y ago
        Double-blind clinical trial. We can use elephants as a proxy.
        • throwup238 2y ago
          Honestly I think my ERB would have a bigger problem with killing elephants for food than putting infants in danger.
          • Terr_ 2y ago
            Understandable: The human subjects will be protected from trauma by infantile amnesia--but elephants never forget.
• abecedarius 2y ago
  "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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3885556/
  • samatman 2y ago
    You can't measure nitrogen isotopes from fat, because it doesn't have any nitrogen. That comes from protein, so that's what they're measuring.
    • abecedarius 2y ago
      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.
      • usrusr 2y ago
        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.
        • abecedarius 2y ago
          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.
• aziaziazi 2y ago
  Interesting complementary view at the end: > 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.”
  • KennyBlanken 2y ago
    This is one of the main problems with the "paleo" diet, which pretends that humans all ate exclusively red meat and...nuts, I think, they claim? The reality: they ate whatever was plentiful in the particular area they were living in.
    • Auracle 2y ago
      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.
    • m0llusk 2y ago
      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.
• Aloisius 2y ago
  The NYT article covers the context of the responses, the climate change vs. overkill debate w.r.t megafauna extinctions better: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/science/mammoth-extinction-human-hunting.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/science/mammoth-extinctio... 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.
  • zizee 2y ago
    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.
    • nkrisc 2y ago
      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.
      • Aloisius 2y ago
        > If humans hadn’t been around to hunt them they’d probably be extinct anyway. Why? They survived greater climatic change/habitat loss before.