i remember reading how eskimos would wrap sharp bone fragments in balls of fat and leave them for polar bears… then they would follow the bears until they died of internal bleeding.
elephants are much smarter than bears though.
I mean, we wiped out mastodons completely: Humans can be like that sometimes.
Isnt there a similar thing where they put a blood soaked knife in the snow blade up and a wild wolf will come and lick the blood off, cutting their tongue on the blade and keep lapping at it not realising its their blood until they pass out.
That reminds me of how when there is a mosquito in your arm you can pinch the skin around it, trapping its sucker in your skin and at the same time violently blasting your blood into the mosquito until it’s too fat to fly.
that is such a grimy way to hunt lol. basically poisoning without the risk eating the meat
It’s the arctic and a polar bear. Is it fair? Well it’s about as fair as fishing. And if they don’t do either they’ll see how fair starving on a block of ice is
Maybe people shouldn’t be living there if they can’t survive without poisoning their prey
Pikes were used much the same way right? Surprised I never put the two together, ancient humans weren’t stupid so of course they’d realize that was a better way of causing harm than just throwing it. Not to mention their use of leverage in weapons like the Atlatl. No clue on the timespan of these things but I do find this stuff interesting.
I’m sure so much of our history is more or less completely unknowable simply because the remains all degraded quickly.
How many things made out of wood that simply rotted away, or burned or any one of a thousand things.
Stone tools were a game changer in every sense.
I would posit string being the real game changer. How do you think they got the stone on the end of a stick?
Honest answer, usually animal sinew, or certain grasses could be used as well. The nice thing with string, once it was figured out was you could make as much as you could, and make it as long as you wanted.
Makes sense, use the prey’s weight and momentum to do the hard work, rather than the relativly feable arm of a much smaller creature!
Many people have a silly idea in their heads that stone-age humans could not be as innovative and smart as we can because their technology was less advanced than ours.
They also look at an expertly-knapped spearhead like the ones in the thumbnail and think they could do that with a couple of rocks they find in their backyard.
These ancestors of ours were smart, they were creative thinkers, they made stone tools at an expert level that the average person today could not even hope to replicate. I love finding out new ways they were able to innovate.
Modern society has existed in a flash on an evolutionary timescale, it’s likely that our ancient ancestors were exactly as “smart” as we are
The grooves carved into each point could allow it to slide down the shaft upon impact. A fixed point, by contrast, would be more likely to shatter when it hit dense material, especially bone.
This is really interesting. And to further illustrate just how much we have no idea and might be wildly wrong, there’s an incredible book, All Yesterdays, which reimagines prehistoric animals in interesting new ways. The second half of the book shows possible recreations of contemporary animals based solely on their skeletons to really drive home the point at how much guessing is involved in this field. Some of the images can be found here.
This is a rhino skeleton (wtf):
We do know a lot more about mammoths though, because they have been found frozen in good condition in Siberia.
Fuckin bullshit. I’ve seen the cave paintings - they were throwing those fuckers
How do you think they got the mammoth to run into the trap of spears? Also, in case it turned towards you, you’d want a spear in your hands to make him turn.
Edit: judging by the picture in the post, if you couldn’t run away, you might jam the back end into the ground beside/behind yourself and hold up the point so at least he’d be wounded when he squashed you
As far as I know, the Clovis people did not make cave paintings and the people who did make cave paintings didn’t hunt mammoths.
