When People Fled Hyenas

ABC News ^ | By Lee Dye

[Rainmist]

I'm envisioning a Far Side cartoon ......

[Sabertooth]

Yikes!

	A composite image of the skulls of Pachycrocuta and H. erectus, left,shows how the giant hyena may have attacked the face. Beneath is a disgorged piece of an H. erectus thighbone.

 

The pattern of damage on some of the skulls sheds light on how hyenas may have handled them. Bite marks on the brow ridge above the eyes indicate that this protrusion had been grasped and bitten by an animal in the course of chewing off the face. Most animals' facial bones are quite thin, and modern hyenas frequently attack or bite the face first; similarly, their ancient predecessors would likely have discovered this vulnerable region in H. erectus. Practically no such facial bones, whose structure is known to us from discoveries at other sites, have been found in the Longgushan cave.

The rest of the skull is a pretty tough nut to crack, however, even for Pachycrocuta, since it consists of bones half again as thick as those of a modern human, with massive mounds called tori above the eyes and ears and around the back of the skull. Puncture marks and elongated bite marks around the skulls reveal that the hyenas gnawed at and grappled with them, probably in an effort to crack open the cranium and consume the tasty, lipid-rich brain. We concluded that the hyenas probably succeeded best by chewing through the face, gaining a purchase on the bone surrounding the foramen magnum (the opening in the cranium where the spinal cord enters), and then gnawing away until the skull vault cracked apart or the opening was large enough to expose the brain. This is how we believe the skull bases were destroyed - not by the actions of cannibalistic H. erectus.
LINK

[Mike Darancette]

The Bering Land Bridge that the first Americans crossed into the New World from Siberia had been there for thousands of years before those first immigrants arrived, most likely around 12,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence suggests the bridge surfaced repeatedly for at least 40,000 years as seawater became trapped in glaciers during the last Ice Age.

Maybe there were very short periods of time, like at the end of last glaciation, when the Bering Land Bridge existed and there was a path clear of glaciers into the interior of the North American Continent.

[txhurl]

For some reason the atmospherics and imagination piques of our scenario here are very fascinating, and I wish I could go back in time to investigate this.

'Course, what was probably really happening was something out of John Carpenter's The Thing, so maybe I don't wanna go.....

[muleskinner]

I saw a Discovery Channel special that theorized that an enormous Grizzly-type bear is the culprit that munched on humans who crossed the land

I saw the same thing. It was the ancestor to the Kodiak, or related to it. It was bigger than a modern horse and could run up to 40 mph. The head, teeth and appetite were, of course, just as impressive.

[Dark Wing]

ping

[txhurl]

An excerpt from The World of the American Indian (National Geographic Society), that I mailed you, concering how one might deal with an animal as huge as the hyena Sabertooth has provided pics of:

Boxtraps made of rock, pitfalls dug in snow, and deadfall traps caught larger animals such as foxes, wolves - even a few caribou. To catch a wolf, Eskimos occasionally used what one explored called 'the most fiendish trap ever devised' - sharpened splinters of caribou bone set into ice and smeared with blood and fat. When a wolf licked the bait, it slashed its tongue, and, goaded by the taste of its own fresh blood, kept lapping until it bled to death.

Something that huge, I can't see taking down with ones' hands or even spears, hunting them in a group!

[VadeRetro]

Hyena the size of a bear! Oh, my!

[VadeRetro]

That, and maybe some kind of poisoning. (Although poisoning's pretty indiscriminate by comparison.)

I wouldn't want to have to handle such critters by low-tech means. Give me something center-fire, accurate, and non-jamming.

[Pharmboy]

Big Bite Ping

[VadeRetro]

Interesting article. The idea of a multi-regional gene pool isn't dead.

[Sabertooth]

Interesting article...

Follow the link, there's a bigger companion article posted with it.

[Cogadh na Sith]

Hey, C'mere... You'll like this.

[gnarledmaw]

Ping.......

[blam]

"I think it was probably something else, maybe something we can't ever discover through bone fragments. Maybe a religious taboo, or maybe it was simply tales from travelers saying that Alaska was no paradise. But it was something."

I like Turner and I like him a lot. However, you're letting him control the argument by agreeing with him on the 14k year date, which I don't.
How did the 80k year old Jomon and the less old Ainu get to Asia? (They came across Siberia, that's how.)

[Dog Gone]

I'm not familiar with either Jomon or Ainu, so I don't have an opinion on that. I don't think there's much doubt than man originated in Africa and that only much later did he make it to the Americas.

Whether that was 14k years ago or not is still subject to debate, and recently it's been a moving target. Regardless, it is only in the very recent past that it occurred, even if it was only 100,000 years ago.

The Bering land bridge is still the only mechanism which can explain a migration. Kon-tiki boats aren't very plausible for that, especially the earlier you get on the timeline.

[blam]

Calico: A 200,000-Year-Old Site In The Americas?

[Dog Gone]

Artifact dating can be tough, especially if there is some question of whether they are even artifacts. But there is little doubt that scientists are often trapped by there preconceived notions of reality and working theories.

There is no reason that I know of that there couldn't have been several distinct waves of human migration to the Americas, preceding Clovis Man by thousands of years. They should have been more thoughtful, though, and left us some bones. ;-)

[Rebelbase]

"enormous Grizzly-type bear is the culprit that munched on humans who crossed the land"

I can see a point in that by looking at modern grizzlies who head to river shallows during salmon spawning season.

Ancient bears could have learned that during the short, warm summer, the land bridge would be ripe with two legged beasts.

[txhurl]

The Clovis man..... did not attack prey so much as herd and drive them over deepends, ravines... and even they only date out to 12K y.ago.....in NM.

This is nearly as an exciting evolutionary 'discovery' as T. Rex, and what a movie this would make... 'how to die as nastily as a great white attack but on land with a 40-pack.'