AURA

Okay. Here’s something about the Buffalo Bison. You’re both gonna’ like this I’m sure. Paleontologist Scott Elias of the University of Colorado writes

Scott A. Elias, The Ice-Age History of Southwestern National Parks, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), p.131:

"The rich Anasazi culture that produced the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and the imposing city at Chaco Canyon did not spring full-blown onto the Colorado Plateau. Rather, the classical Anasazi period was the end product of thousands of years of cultural and technological development, starting with the Clovis culture near the end of the last glaciation. These people were probably the direct descendants of nomadic hunters who entered the New World from Siberia by way of the Bering Land Bridge, sometime before 12,000 yr B.P. Clovis hunters made distinctive projectile points that archaeologists have used to classify their culture.

"With a documented span of only 500 years, this culture was relatively short lived. One reason is that Clovis peoples appear to have specialized in mammoth hunting. Mammoth bones have been found in nearly every Clovis site throughout the Southwest, along with bones of bison, Pleistocene horse, camel, tapir, wolf, bear, and jackrabbit .... Most of the prey animals taken by Clovis peoples became extinct shortly after the time that the traces of Clovis culture disappeared (give or take a few hundred years). This extinction included several kinds of mammoth, North American camel, ground sloth, Pleistocene horse, saber-toothed cat, North American lion, giant short-faced bear, and giant Pleistocene bison. Perhaps this was one of the important forces behind cultural change in Paleoindian bands at the end of the last ice age.

p. 133:

"The Clovis culture was followed by the Folsom culture, identified from the distinctive fluted projectile points first described from a site near Folsom, New Mexico. During the Folsom Period, hunters on the plains of eastern New Mexico began to focus on the hunting of Pleistocene large-horned bison.

p. 112:

"Ecologist Paul Martin [paleontologist of the U.S. Geological Survey, Tucson] is convinced that these Paleoindian hunters exterminated the Pleistocene megafauna in the New World, a ‘Pleistocene overkill.’ The theory pro­poses that the megafauna of North America was especially vulnerable to Paleoindian hunters because the people were newcomers on this continent at the end of the Pleistocene, and the animals, unaccustomed to human hunters, had little natural fear of them. The Paleoindians that arrived in Alaska via the Bering Land Bridge spread southward as an ice-free corridor opened up between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. Human populations expanded as new territory became colonized, and the megafaunal mammal hunters exterminated many of their prey animals within a few hundred years of their arrival south of the continental ice sheets. Martin’s theory holds that the new hunting pressure, combined with rapid climate change, wiped out most of the megafauna on this continent.

"Paleontologists, paleoecologists, and archaeologists are sharply divided on the issue of megafaunal extinction. Some believe that humans had little or nothing to do with the extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene.

p. 115:

We will probably never know if the overkill theory is the right one, since the fossil evidence is so spotty. However, if it does the best job of explaining the data we have accumulated, it should at least be given full consideration [because] human beings everywhere and at all times in the past have responded to their environments in much the same way. Given adequate tools and sufficient numbers, people have always exploited natural resources (including game animals, minerals, water supplies, and living space) to the point where some of those resources became extremely scarce.

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