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To: Flag_This

***However, the claim that they hunted the mammoths to extinction is b.s.***

Unless...they took less risk & killed too many small, young mammoths; thus diminishing the numbers of future breeders.

Have noticed how my dogs do not attack baby rabbits or squirrels....they just play with them and chase them away.
Which, in the wild, allows for breeders and future food.


44 posted on 09/14/2013 2:38:07 AM PDT by sodpoodle (Life is prickly - carry tweezers.)
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To: sodpoodle
Some of the earliest human structures ever discovered were constructed largely from mammoth bones:

"A farmer, digging his cellar, almost two meters below ground level, struck the massive lower jaw of a mammoth with his spade. The jawbone was upside down, and had been inserted into the bottom of another jaw like a child's building brick. In fact, as subsequent excavation showed, a complete ring of these inverted interlocking jaws formed the solid base of a roughly circular hut four or five meters across. About three dozen huge, curving mammoth tusks had been used as arching supports for the roof and for the porch, some of them still left in their sockets in the skulls. Separate lengths of tusks were even linked in laces by a hollow sleeve of ivory that fitted over the join. It has been stimated that the total of bones incorporated in the structure must have belonged to a minimum of ninety-five mammoths. This need ,not be a measure of some prodigious hunting feat, since gnawing marks of carnivores suggest that many of them were scavenged. However, the task of dragging the enormous skulls across country should not be underestimated since a-small one weighed about one hundred kilograms." link

Like the article says, they didn't necessarily hunt and kill all the mammoths used to create the structure, but they have found many of these sites in Russia, the Ukraine and Poland, so this isn't some rare anomaly. It's difficult to believe that these structures were all constructed by tidy humans policing up mammoth litter.

They've also found numerous "butcher sites" in the U.S. consisting of mammoth bones with cut marks, and stone artifacts. Maybe these were just examples where humans found a dead or dying mammoth and they took advantage of an opportunity, but I don't see why it would be beyond their abilities to spear a mammoth with a 6-inch long Clovis point and then follow it for a few days until it dropped. After all, thousands of pounds of meat could be gained with a fairly low risk.

The reason I don't believe humans are responsible for causing the extinction of the mammoth is because dozens of other species went extinct around the same time.

46 posted on 09/14/2013 6:21:36 AM PDT by Flag_This (Term limits.)
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