(sorry, if this double posts)

Dan Kurt

The analysis of Neanderthals as secondary members of a guild of predators makes sense and fits in nicely with their narrower diet relative to Cro-Magnons who took more advantage of small game and fish and other seafood, giving them a more diverse diet that wasn’t as strongly competing with the predator’s guild. They were competing more with secondary predators and less with top predators, although they could utilize both sources of food.

It also seems that the Cro-Magnons had brains that were less hard wired and more plastic, allowing them to adapt more easily and to evolve culturally instead of genetically, and thus at a more rapid pace. Adaptability also matter because the climate was very unstable in the period from 40 kya to 29 kya when modern humans and Neanderthals overlapped. Without much movement, the climate region could change dramatically in a generation, and that required innovative approaches. Yet Neanderthal tools evolved only very, very slowly (at least ten times as long between new material cultures), and the last fairly rapid round of Neanderthal tool improvement may have been due to human-Neanderthal hybrids in their communities.

In Australia, while the animals weren’t exposed to humans before, they were pretty fearsome by most accounts. It appears that a key tool for those (pre-dog) modern humans was the systemic use of fire as a weapon of mass destruction against animals that were threats to them.

The counter to the scenario of modern humans in the Americas (the main wave) is that the Younger Dryas was probably a comparably important factor. Clovis people may have been hyper-predators, but their food supply and lifestyle were made untenable in all likelihood, mostly due to the Younger Dryas event. Maybe overhunting was a bigger deal for South American megafauna.

IMHO, the biggest technology factor that gave modern humans an edge in the main wave in the Americas was probably their use of domesticated dogs, and not really their tools.

A thin on the ground “progenitor” wave (to use your terminology from a prior post), may have lacked dogs, may have had a marginally sustainable effective population size due to a shortage of women (only just barely able to sustain itself for multiple generations and possibly with multiple bottlenecks and inbreeding depression), and may have not had the fully developed skills of their culture as it may have been a male dominated expeditionary group of young people without skilled toolmakers and lore preservers who were forced to reinvent those technologies in inferior ways.

]]> https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2025/08/30/king-of-the-beasts/#comment-162138 Sun, 31 Aug 2025 21:48:16 +0000 http://westhunt.wordpress.com/?p=5527#comment-162138 In reply to teageegeepea.

One internet find claimed: Evidence suggests that Subarctic peoples first brought the archery bow with them to North America from Asia (c. 30,000-10,000 b.c.e.). Its use gradually spread throughout the coastal regions, then southeastward following the principal migratory routes of nomadic hunters.

But then wikipedia says: “Archery seems to have arrived in the Americas via Alaska, as early as 6000 BC,[27] with the Arctic small tool tradition, about 2500 BC, spreading south into the temperate zones as early as 2000 BC, and was widely known among the indigenous peoples of North America from about 500 AD”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archery