james_davis_nicoll | About Doug Hoff's Empty America

why did the Arctodus Simus WI not go anywhere?

I presented it in a boring and uninspiring manner.

Huh. I find the whole subject pretty exciting. I found the whole quote here:

"The Arctoduspaleozoologist Valerius Geist <geistvr@cedar.alberni.net> speaks about "the predator hell hole which was Pleistocene North America" and argues that it was uninhabitable to human beings until around 15,000 years ago. In addition to the still surviving Black Bear, "there were three short-faced bear species, all larger, two specialized as super carnivores (one about 7-8 feet at the shoulder, and one as a super vegetarian convergent with Europe's cave bear. Nasty customers all. In addition there were true lions, only twice the mass of African specimen, two species of large sabre toothed cats, jaguars, large cheetah-like running cats and big dire wolves." Grizzly bears came later, across the Bering land bridge, along with humans.

from cogweb.ucla.edu/Chumash/EntryDate.html

And then there are Amphicyonids (which I like because they sort of answer the question: cat is to lion as dog is to ?), and even, if you don't mind dipping into a really different era for your source material, Andrewsarchus, which looks very scary and quite inspiring!

only problem is that more and more its looking like the sea route was the one taken. Coastlines are your friend...especially since the in-land corridors down to the lush spots are pretty much barren sucky hellholes. Cold and no food, really.

AT the risk of being all human uber alles, I'm very, very skeptical of non-human predators being a match for any humans. Pointy stick + fire + complex social behavior = an unbeatable combination. The only continent stone age humans didn't manage to settle was Antarctica and there the issue is accessibility and climate.

Well, when it comes down to it, there's very, very little that humanity can't whup that's Earth native at least. Fire+pointy stick+complex social behavior was excellent, but when you add in ranged attacks...uh...

Does it seem mysterious to you that the Americas were not definitively settled much sooner? I don't know enough anthropology to know whether this is generally thought to be a mystery.

Does it seem mysterious to you that the Americas were not definitively settled much sooner?

A little, although I can see how the climate when modern humans settled Asia would have worked against it.

Part of the problem is the pretty massive climate fluctuations that occurred. During ice ages,, the sea levels go way down, which means there's more land. So yay. But that land is also more arid. So archaological evidence of beachcombing hunter-gatherer societies (generally speaking the most prosperous, because coastlines are rich in resources even during an ice age) is under water now. Between glaciers and polar desert, much of the interior of North America was not especially hospitable territory for a long time. When it became more hospitable it quickly got itself populated, as did South America.

Offhand I can't think of any books specifically about the settling of the Americas (though I'm sure they exist). However, Stephen Oppenheimer's "The Real Eve" has several chapters on the Americas, and those provide a good summary written in accessible language (which is good for folks like me, who are definitely laypeople). Oppenheimer also summarises the theories which used to be popular (such as "overkill") and talks about why certain theories grabbed the popular imagination despite weaknesses in the evidence (and there's a lot of racial baggage tied up in the study of the early Americas). Oppenheimer isn't what you'd call neutral on the subject, and he doesn't pretend to be. But he backs up his opinions wit facts, and doesn't shy away from talking about competing theories, or admitting when he simply doesn't have a neat explanation for something. I'd definitely recommend the book, which traces human migrations through mitochondrial DNA. It's a fascinating and well-written intro to an interesting field. And no, I don't know Oppenheimer. I'm just shilling because I think it's a damn good book, and it does have a fair bit about the genetic background of indigenous North and South Americans.

Another excellent book aimed at the layperson is Charles C. Mann's "1491: The Americas Before Columbus". It doesn't really go into the *origins* of the indigenous cultures, but it's fascinating on the subject of what was actually going on in the Americas when the Europeans arrived, as opposed to the popular misconceptions of it as a virgin land. Mann is particularly good on managed ecology. Bottom line, much of North America would've been totally unsuitable for colonial habitation if it hadn't been for thousands of years of the original occupants intensively managing the land, in some places agriculturally, and in other places through high yield hunting and gathering (ex: controlled brush burns to inhibit forest growth and instead promote grasslands suitable for big game hunting).

Thanks! That was a very interesting post.

What I still don't understand is this: if much of the interior of North America had a climate that was not especially hospitable to humans, why was it able to support such a varied population of mammalian megafauna, to the extent that it could support so many of the giant super-carnivores referenced above. Can't humans live comfortably anywhere that lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!) can live? Was the climate such that the megafauna could live in N. America but it was simultaneously stopping humans from coming over from the old world?

PS Unlike Usenet, where a new post would bump this thread to the top, I guess I was too slow on the draw, and no one will see these questions except for you and James Nicoll. But thanks again -- I'll definitely look up the books you recommend!

Okay, I wasn't very clear. Initial occupation of North America was probably confined to coastlines because large parts of the North American landmass were, well, glaciers. Generally speaking, a glacier doesn't support a whole lot of life. And their sheer size can block off access from the coasts to chilly but non-glacier inland areas that DO support plant and animal life (so you'll get big islands surrounded by ice rather than water, and regional fauna populations that are cut off from each other and from predators that aren't already on their "island"). So one fairly well-supported hypothesis right now is that humans have been in the Americas for a very long time, but in fairly small numbers confined to limited areas along the coasts where they could scrape a living. As the world warmed up again, sea levels rose (submerging many initial settlement sites) but there was a heck of a lot more habitable territory opened up inland, so they actually gained usable land despite the continents technically becoming smaller.

Vegetation and animal life moved into formerly glaciated areas with a vengeance, and humans followed them. They had to adapt from a beachcombing lifestyle to an inland hunting and gathering lifestyle, but the benefit was that there were major population surges because they had so many new places to spread into. One of the reasons it was long believed that Clovis kill sites represented the first North Americans was because there are, comparatively speaking, a heck of a lot more Clovis sites than there are earlier. Which is consistent with a population boom, and a move to a different hunting style. There's not a lot of big game along the coastlines, except marine mammals, which are more dangerous to hunt than are comparably-sized land mammals. Coastal peoples are more likely to get their daily protein from fish and shellfish, if it's plentifully available (which it often is in non-Arctic conditions). They generally hunt big marine mammals for status/prestige/religious reasons rather than as a major component of their diet.

So, the kind of managed ecology that Charles C. Mann talks about in "1491" is typical of what happened well *after* humans had expanded into this new inland niche. They had already expanded to live pretty much anywhere it was possible for human life to be supported, and if they wanted to increase their population, they had to either switch to agriculture (which happened in some areas) or they had to find a way to make hunting and gathering more high-yield. Hence the controlled burns etc.

Where was I? Basically, nobody's saying that early humans didn't hunt megafauna, because obviously they did. But there's a lot of species-by-species evidence coming out that different megafauna species went extinct at very different times and for very different reasons. Some went extinct before humans arrived in their part of the Americas, others co-existed with humans for thousands of years before dying out. Yet others died out, but there 's no evidence of humans having preyed on them (i.e. remains can be found, but with no spear points in among the bones and/or signs of cutting tools used to butcher the bones) Which isn't to say that human hunting had zero impact on NorAm megafauna, but while human hunting is definitely implicated in the extinctions of some species, it's not in a lot of other species. The elegance of the overkill hypothesis (and one of the reasons it's stuck around so long in spite of a lot of conflicting evidence) was that it accounted at one fell swoop for the extinctions of about 60 different species with a single cause.

There's a book (that I should emphasise I haven't read yet, so I can't say for sure that it's any good). It's by David J. Meltzer of Southern Methodist University in Texas, and it's called "First Peoples in a New World". I haven't read it yet because it's not released in Canada until May 27 (not sure about the US release date), although I have pre-ordered it. I'm fairly confident in it, because I've read Meltzer's previous book "Folsom", and Meltzer is one of the key players in the re-evaluating of the overkill hypothesis. I mean, it *could* turn out to be terrible, but I pretty much doubt it is, based on his previous book (on another subject) and those of his journal articles I've read on the subject. I expect it will have a lot of stuff about the initial colonisation of the Americas, based on what I know of his previous work, and also based on the publisher's blurb. So consider that book rec #3.

And while i'm throwing recs at you, try a link that won't cost you any money. (http://www.pnas.org/content/105/11/4077.full)

P.S. Speaking of "island" populations marooned by surrounding glaciers, that didn't only happen to fauna, but to humans as well. A major source of the expansion into the North American continent is believed to be a sort of paleo-Inuit population which hypothetically spent thousands of years in Beringia. Beringia no longer exists, owing to rising sea levels, but during the last ice age, it was a smallish land mass (well, small-ish by continent standards) in between Asia and North America. Despite being far north, it's believed to have had non-glaciated areas, but those non-glaciated areas would've been cut off by glaciers from both Siberia behind them and Alaska ahead. As the ice age got colder, there was less non-glaciated land, and the Beringians would've experienced pretty severe population contractions. However, as the ice sheets retreated, more territory opened up for them, which was just as well because the comparatively low-lying Beringia was getting kind of soggy! Please note that the above is speculative, not proven, but it's a pretty neat explanation that matches up glacial evidence with genetic evidence. i.e. Modern-day Inuit populations are known to have been in North America for a comparatively short time (based on historical glaciation and also on genetic evidence). However, the genetic evidence also shows that North American Inuit diverged from Siberian Inuit a very long time ago (thousands of years longer than they could've been living in North America). Also that NorAm Inuit show evidence of genetic drift consistent with a severe population bottleneck and subsequent re-expansion of the population.

Thanks for the summary.

I wanted to (and I still want to) reply to your fantastic set of comments with some content of my own, but I don't want too much time to go by without saying thank you! I'm definitely not sorry I asked, and I'm very glad you answered. Your comments are helping me see the whole picture (or at least one or two plausible whole pictures). I need to process some more, but thank you again!

Didn't the wooly mammoths that lived in the north of north america go extinct aroudn about the same time that people made it across the land bridge between asia and alaska?

or were they pushed!?

Yes.

However.

There's a big bun fight over what did in the Ice Age megafauna.

There's strong evidence that there was an impact around 12.9k years ago. Some people are claiming this caused the extinction of the NorAm megafauna. And the Clovis culture.

(NorAm does have a deficiency if you think about it)

The other man popular (among paleo types) is the arrival of people.

The problem with the former is taht there are actually mammoth and mastodont fossils and survivors loooong past 12.9k years ago. It also fails to explain why SoAm's megafauna took such a hit too.

About Doug Hoff's Empty America

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bearing in mind that I'm just an interested layperson, not an expert

Part 2 (bet now you're sorry you asked)

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