Originally Posted by Rain Man:
I've never read anything about how common these creatures were and how common humans were. How often did humans encounter mega-carnivores? It would seem that a human with a spear, or even ten humans with ten spears wouldn't last long against a pride of American lions or a pack of dire wolves. I'm wondering if the humans had to take great pains to avoid areas where creatures like that roamed, or if it was a rare enough phenomenon that when it happened the humans simply joined the fossil record.
It seems that our ancestors did encounter bears based on our mutual love of cave dwellings. Somehow our people with pointy sticks seemed to give as good as they got, right? Or is that why teepees and mud huts and brick houses were invented?
I’ve wondered this myself. How much danger did a saber-toothed tiger or short-faced bear pose to an adult male? I’d love to be a fly on a tree in ancient times.
I’m sure you’ve seen the images of Buffalo skulls stacked probably 30-feet high? We know the French were big on trading animal furs in America as well. Obviously this is a bit later time period than fresh out of the last Ice Age but still. I’d bet it was pretty common for humans to encounter massive predators with prey so numerous, if only for the fact that they’d be drawn to the smell of food we were processing.
But yeah, it definitely seems we gave it as good as we got it. For one thing, most of these large predators have a healthy fear of humans. That leads me to believe we probably killed off the more bold members of the species, only leaving the ones who feared us to procreate.
It’s funny to talk about this animal vs that animal in a fight. Humans with no weapons are so far down the totem pole, it’s hilarious. But you get 10-15 of us together, all pissed off because our neighbor’s baby got snatched by a wolf, and we become really fucking terrifying. We can run for longer distances than basically anything in the animal kingdom and we can throw stuff with surprising accuracy. Imagine getting stalked by a small army of strange, hairless Terminators wearing your cousin’s skin who can kill you before you even see them lol
Originally Posted by :
There seems to be a lot of evidence that humans hunted mammoths, which is kind of astounding. It seems like a waste of risk and energy to hunt something so large that it'll putrefy before you can eat it, not to mention that the smell of a dead mammoth would likely draw every carrion eater within a day's walk. But they obviously knew more than I do about it, so it must've been a good idea.
Now I need to do some math. Weight estimates for mammoths are all over the board, but let's go with 13,000 pounds as an average. As a total guess, let's assume that 2/3 of that is edible bits, as opposed to bones and fur and tusks. So you've got roughly 9,000 pounds of meat.
How long will 9,000 pounds of meat last before it goes bad? We're talking ice age, so it's possible that all of nature was a refrigerator. But you've also got body heat and bacteria and stuff keeping it warm. Maybe you could still eat it after two weeks? I have no idea, so someone else can do better research.
So you have to eat 9,000 pounds of mammoth in two weeks to be fully efficient. That's 640 pounds per day.
What would a human eat? Maybe if you went with an all-mammoth paleo diet, you could eat 2.5 pounds? That's a 40-ounce steak.
So 640 pounds divided by 2.5 pounds per day means that a group of 256 people would enjoy mammoth steaks. There's no way that a hunting and gathering culture would have 256 people, right? So they would have killed this giant creature and then eaten maybe 1/4 of it? Why not kill something smaller that's less likely to pound you into neanderjelly?
Or were mammoths actually easy to kill compared to something like an oryx or a buffalo that might be more agile? And in that environment where there was a mammoth behind every tree, it's not like they were stressing the environment or competing for food. Food was everywhere compared to the number of people who needed it. So I guess wastage probably didn't matter at all. Maybe they killed mammoths just because they liked to eat the spleen or something.
I’ve always wondered the same. Cultures that hunted whales too. What tf are they doing with all of that meat?
I figure that’s probably wear jerky first came from.
https://frontierbushcraft.com/2020/0...-in-the-woods/
Looks like there are primitive ways to make it. That would probably add another couple weeks to the shelf life of the meat..? Not too sure.
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