I will NEVER buy in to the “survived by eating mammoths” BS.
You know what they called the first guy in the hunting party who got near a mammoth?
They called him Dead!!
Look, an American bison is piddly compared to a mammoth. And I agree, Native Americans were able to take some bison.
But they NEVER would have been able to wipe them out without the horse and the gun.
It is not a coincidence that the mammoths disappeared at the same time a huge number of North American animals disappeared.
And probably from the same cause. Evidence is growing it was a cometary impact (or aerial explosion) a bit southwest of Lake Superior about 13,500 years ago.
I’m convinced humans could hunt mammoth, I disagree we had anything to do with extinction of them.
I went to an archaeological site this summer where the Native Americans drove hundreds of thousands of buffalo over a cliff. I agree that in a spear to mammoth fight a mammoth would win but these guys were smart an most likely used unconventional tactics to take down their prey. Why had the big game animals lived through so many periods of glaciation and then when humans showed up they all died out? I think humans had a role in these extinctions.