Overkill, Overchill and Human Nature
by Jason GodeskyThe standard rejoinder when discussing the ecological devastation wrought by civilization and the relatively benign existence of hunter-gatherers is to point out that hunter-gatherers caused extinctions of their own–the extinction of the megafauna at the beginning of the Holocene interglacial, including the mammoths, the cave bear, thee giant hyaena, the giant rat of Majorca, the American horse, saber-toothed cats, diprotodons (giant relatives of the wombats), and an Austrlian, a leopard-sized marsupial lion, among many others. These, according to Paul S. Martin’s “overkill” theory, were hunted to extinction by ravenous, Pleistocene human foragers every bit as rapacious in their ecological exploitation as any modern civilization. This is ill-founded anachronism of the highest order.
Overkill theorists take their cues from the extinctions in New Zealand, which was once home to 11 different species of large, flightless birds called moas. Within a few centuries of human habitation, they were extinct. “We do know that human colonists caused extinctions in isolated, tightly bound island settings, but islands are fundamentally different from continents,” says Donald Grayson. “The overkill hypothesis attempts to compare the incomparable and there is no evidence of human-caused environmental change in North America. But there is evidence of climate change. Overkill is bad science because it is immune to the empirical record.”
Another quote from Grayson puts an even finer point on it: “Martin’s [overkill] theory is glitzy, easy to understand and fits with our image of ourselves as all-powerful … It also fits well with the modern Green movement and the Judeo-Christian view of our place in the world. But there is no reason to believe that the early peoples of North America did what Martin’s argument says they did.”
For one thing, while we can certainly understand the extinction of mammoths or bison in terms of human overhunting, what of all the other animals that died off at the same time? Were humans really hunting saber-toothed tigers, and in such numbers as to drive a robust and healthy species into extinction? Were aborigines overhunting the diprotodon, who likely became enshrined in their mythology as the demonic bunyip? We find plenty of mammoth bones at human habitation sites, but none of these other species.
In “Climate Change Caused Extinction of Big Ice Age Mammals, Scientist Says,” written for National Geographic News in November 2001, Hllary Mayell writes:
The overkill hypothesis, Grayson says, rests on five tenets: human colonization can lead to the extinction of island species; the Clovis people were the first humans to arrive in North America, around 11,000 years ago; the Clovis people hunted a wide range of large mammals; the extinction of many species of North American megafauna occurred 11,000 years ago; and therefore, Clovis hunting caused those extinctions.
Grayson disputes several of these tenets.
There is no proof, he said, that the late Pleistocene extinctions occurred in conjunction with the arrival of the Clovis people. “Of the 35 genera to have become extinct beginning around 20,000 years ago, only 15 can be shown to have survived beyond 12,000 years ago,” Grayson said. “The Clovis peoples didn’t arrive until shorty before 11,000 years ago. That leaves 20 [genera] unaccounted for.”
There is also no evidence that the Clovis people hunted anything other than mammoths, he said. Although numerous sites where large numbers of mammoths were killed have been uncovered, no similar sites for any other large mammals have been found in North America.
And while there is no evidence of widespread human-caused environmental change similar to that seen on island settings, there is evidence that animal populations in Siberia and Western Europe, as well as North America, were affected during the same period by climate changes and glacial retreat.
In addition, the primacy of the Clovis mgiration has itself come under serious assault, first with artifacts from Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania with artifacts dating back 30,000 years. We now have several sites with artifacts dating back similarly to three times the age of Clovis, at Monte Verde, Chile, Cactus Hill, Virginia, and the Topper site on the Savannah River near Allendale, South Carolina. Mitochondrial DNA from Native Americans show a divergence from the Siberian population 20,000 years ago–again, significantly older than Clovis. This makes the idea that the Clovis were the first people in North America increasingly untenable–and if the Clovis were not the first people in North America, that means that people were living in North America well before the mass extinction began.
And it appears that bison, at least, were on the decline already when human hunters made their entrance. A report from USA Today says:
A team of 27 scientists used ancient DNA to track the hulking herbivore’s boom-and-bust population patterns, adding to growing evidence that climate change was to blame.
“The interesting thing that we say about the extinctions, is that whatever happened, it wasn’t due to humans,” said the paper’s lead author, Beth Shapiro, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at Oxford University. By the time people arrived, “these populations are already significantly in decline and on the brink of whatever was going to happen to them in the future.”
The story written into the bison’s DNA is one of an exponential increase in diversity with herd sizes doubling every 10,200 years. Then, 32,000 to 42,000 years ago, the last glacial cycle kicked in, beginning a lengthy cooling trend. Bison genetic diversity plummeted. A significant wave of humans didn’t appear in the archaeological record at eastern Beringia until more than 15,000 years later, the authors write in Friday’s Science.
That evokes the alternative “overchill” theory–that the megafauna extinctions were caused not by human predation, but by climate change. The very same climate changes that revealed the Bering land bridge, that made it so easy for the first Polynesians and Australians to hop from island to island, and made it possible for humans to experiment with new niches, also created new conditions that some species adapted to better than others.
Humans were not ecological saints, either. We did cause extinctions undeniably, such as the moras of New Zealand. So does any alpha predator in a new ecology. Alpha predators like humans play keystone roles in any ecology, and introducing such a predator into any new ecology will cause cascades of change, Some species will prosper; others will adapt; still others will go extinct. Moving into a new ecology during a significant climate change meant that the new variable was more than many species could handle. Animals already in decline could not handle the extra pressures, and went extinct. This is not a distinctly human behavior: we can see much the same in Yellowstone:
Ripple points to some black-and-white photographs taken of the same spot in the Lamar Valley more than 50 years apart. “You can see that young aspen and willow were abundant in the early 1900s. By the 1930s the trees had stopped regenerating, and there are no young ones.
“I had a lightbulb,” he continues. He took core samples from 98 aspen trees and discovered that only two had begun to grow after the 1920s–around the time the last substantial populations of wolves were killed or driven off. And these two were in places that elk would be hesitant to frequent for fear of being attacked by predators. Ripple found big trees and tiny trees but nothing in between, because nothing new grew from the 1930s to the 1990s. It was the first concrete evidence of a “wolf effect.”
After human farmers drove the wolves from Yellowstone, the elk populations boomed. They stripped their food supply bare, eating the shoots of young trees as they came up. That began to change the ecology of Yellowstone, driving out songbirds, introducing erosion, and generally wreaking havoc. The re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone in 1995 has been a smashing success. Elk numbers have gone down, trees have returned, songbirds have come back, and the effects of erosion are beginning to heal. Such is the kind of far-reaching relationship that any alpha predator shares with its ecology.
Given that understanding of an alpha predator’s role in any ecology, and the foregoing evidence, how can we conclude that all of these species were wiped out by a few African apes, without any input whatsoever from the changing ecology around them? No, there was no noble savage; but there was no murderous savage, either. Humans were not created good or evil–just human. Our entrance into the Americas, Oceania and the rest of the world was as harmless as wolves, lions or sharks. My words there are carefully chosen. We don’t normally consider wolves, lions or sharks particularly “harmless,” and neither were humans. But we recognize the place such predators have in the natural world. We recognize that they’re part of a bigger picture. We know that introducing them into a new situation will have far-reaching effects on that situation, but we also know that’s not a reflection of their own nature, but the nature of ecology itself. Just like humans.
ah, it’s great to see the last “evidence” that is so often hurled at anarcho-primitivist theory shown to be catigirically false. so, yes we are animals, lets act like it!
Comment by PrimalAnarchy — 1 December 2005 @ 5:26 PM
Hey –
Thank you, Jason…
I keep getting grief because when discussing [u]Guns Germs and Steel[/u] I often mention that the one real problem I have with it is its tendancy to deal with issues like the above as exclusive dicotomies. I use the OverKill/OverChill debate as a prime example, explaining that most likely of all, there was some bit of both effects. And then I hear how I am being too critical, or I don’t know what I’m talking about yadda yadda ya…
So thank you
Janene
Comment by Janene — 1 December 2005 @ 5:36 PM
So I’m not the only one tired of having this argument over and over again. Good.
I will never again explain my position on the overkill theory. Instead, I will provide a link here forevermore.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 December 2005 @ 5:57 PM
Good post; you’ve got some good info I haven’t seen before.
…
However, I don’t think that there is a valid comparison between:
a.) human migration into evolutionarily non-human ecosystems
and
b.) reintroduction of wolves in a National Park where they had featured prominantly into the evolution of its ecosystem, and then been irradicated.
for the purposes of proving that humans had or have a benificial role to the ecosystems of north america.
Comment by Michael — 1 December 2005 @ 11:31 PM
Well first of all, he wasn’t saying that humans have a beneficial role in North American ecosystems. He was just saying that humans didn’t necessarily cause certain extinctions when we were hunter-gatherers.
I agree that you can’t draw the conclusion you noted from that analogy. However, he was just demonstrating the incredible effect that the “alpha-predator” has on a system. Without the alpha-predator wolves, the system fell apart and became something else entirely. When humans spread to another ecoosystem and are suddenly the alpha-predators, the balance goes kaput.
-Mike
Comment by WackyMorningDJ — 2 December 2005 @ 12:22 AM
“Well first of all, he wasn’t saying that humans have a beneficial role in North American ecosystems. He was just saying that humans didn’t necessarily cause certain extinctions when we were hunter-gatherers.”
thanks…I misunderstood.
“When humans spread to another ecoosystem and are suddenly the alpha-predators, the balance goes kaput.”
Cool, that’s kinda the point I was trying to make.
Comment by michael — 2 December 2005 @ 1:20 AM
Which merely means a new balence will be achieved. It only becomes dangerous when no balence is possible due to a positive feedback loop replacing the standard negative one. In other words, balence only ceased to be possible when human population began to grow continuously at an accelerating rate. Hunter-gatherers acheive balence. Granted some species might become extinct in the process, same as when any new predator enters a system. But that alone is insufficent to account for all the extinctions. More likely a combination of many pressures, each indivdually survivable, added up to the end of the megafauna.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 2 December 2005 @ 3:06 AM
I think it would be fascinating to conduct a study on the fossil/paleontological record to see what sort of diversity occurred when humans arrived on the scene in the Americas.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 2 December 2005 @ 9:37 AM
Michael — Mike summed it up well. I’m glad you agree; that was precisely what I meant by the wolf example, not that it was comparable to human migration, but, as I wrote in the article, “Such is the kind of far-reaching relationship that any alpha predator shares with its ecology.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 December 2005 @ 10:36 AM
EVEN if the overkill thing DID happen, who cares? the fact is, the land here in the precolumbian times was completely wild!
Comment by Scott — 2 December 2005 @ 5:45 PM
“Which merely means a new balence will be achieved. It only becomes dangerous when no balence is possible due to a positive feedback loop replacing the standard negative one.”
Ben, I think this is where we disagree. I think were agreeing that: There is a general background rate for the extinction of species as an ecosystem evolves, and there is a dynamic equalibrium between species within an ecosystem, and changing patterns of predation are a part of that system.
I think we have a differing opinion on the holocene extinction and the value of biodiversity in general.
“Such is the kind of far-reaching relationship that any alpha predator shares with its ecology.” Jason, maybe I’m just being picky here, but I tend to view the spread of humans across the americas similarly to the spread of an invasive species in that we weren’t a part of the ecology of native “american” flora/fauna when we arrived. In my view we had a far-reaching relationship that helped to impoverish the biodiversity of this planet, and I tend to see that in negative terms.
Scott: “EVEN if the overkill thing DID happen, who cares? the fact is, the land here in the precolumbian times was completely wild!”
Depends on how you define wild. Is the use of controlled burns to increase deer forage wild? Is agriculture wild? what about Mayan architecture?
I don’t see any of the above as being a part of “completely wild” land. Remember, some 125 million people lived here in precolumbian times and many of these people built civilizations.
Comment by michael — 3 December 2005 @ 2:16 AM
Extinction rates spike noticeable above the background rate when a new alpha predator moves in. “Invasive” doesn’t seem quite right, not with the connotations it’s derived with our importing of whole ecosystems, but yes … it takes some time for an animal to become adapted to a new ecology, and during that adaptation period, a lot of things get sorted out. When it’s an alpha predator, they put another pressure on other animals there that many species can’t handle.
My point is, this happens regardless of whether the alpha predator is a wolf, a lion, a shark, or a human. The extinctions of the Holocene are in line with what you’d expect if there was a period of significant climate change and, say, wolf packs roaming into new continents for the first time. It happened to be human tribes rather than wolf packs.
That’s a very different thing than the mass extinction we’re seeing now, which is on a scale that can’t be compared to anything in the earth’s history.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 December 2005 @ 8:20 AM
Hey –
Well, yes it can be compared to other mass extinctions — it just happens that in the case, our intentional actions are the cause. And that ‘intentional’ bit has everything to do with a certain assumption of humans being able to alter thier behavior consciously… what would cultural materialism say to that?
No one would ‘blame’ aerobic bacteria for the ‘genocide’ of the oxygen holocaust, right?
Janene
Comment by Janene — 3 December 2005 @ 11:12 AM
Ok. So humans didn’t evolve in the Americas. It wasn’t the first time a new species entered an ecosystem (without the help of modern technology) and changed the whole game plan. The only reason we pay so close attention with to this one is that it involves us.
Subsatially decreasing the biodiversity of a region is a very bad thing. I remain unconvinced that the first Holocene extinction ended with a subsatinal net decrease in biodiversity. It was a very small set of extinctions that opened the door for many species to evolve and adapt in new ways. The Americas were hardly impoverished ecologically when the Europeans showed up.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 3 December 2005 @ 11:39 AM
Janene,
I just wanted to let you know that I blame the aerobic bacteria for the oxygen holocaust. We need to wipe them all out before they cause some sort of new atrocity!
Down with aerobes! Up with anaerobes!
Best
Bill Maxwell
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 3 December 2005 @ 2:12 PM
We can argue your statement “I remain unconvinced that the first Holocene extinction ended with a subsatinal net decrease in biodiversity” along with the relative biotic richness/poverty of the americas all day…I don’t think were going to come to an agreement here.
The larger issue I’m trying to raise here (to simplify greatly) is that, unlike wolves or lions or sharks, humans are not limited to a specific habitat. The expansion of other predators is limited by (among other things) their biology. Sharks don’t crawl onto the shore to hunt deer. Wolves live in specific habitats as do lions. They evolve and adapt to other habitats, but this is a slow process and the flora/fauna of these other habitats are evovling at the same time. Humans have created technology (such as warm clothing and watercraft) that allows us to expand faster and farther than any other predator.
In the precolumbian “americas,” early humans (aided by technology such as clothing and clovis points) expanded out of their evolutionary homeland and if not directly caused, at least greatly contributed to the extinction of much of the charasmatic megafauna. Their populations grew, they used controlled burns to increase ungulate habitat, many of them adopted agriculture, some built cities and large civilizations and so on.
Comment by michael — 3 December 2005 @ 7:36 PM
Hmmm, if wolves don’t migrate to other regions I wonder how wolves ended up in both Europe and the Americas. Not to mention cats in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Hmmmm, I wonder why sharks can be found throughout the oceans of the world. Preditors migrate into any region that can support them. Paleolithic humans didn’t live in Antartica, didn’t live at the bottom of the ocean, in space, and many island remained uninhabited. Clothing isn’t such a bad adaptation, but it only sped up what we would have done anyway. And I doubt it sped it up by much more than a few hundred thousand years. Denser hair is a simple adaptation when we still have the same number of hair folicles as gorrillas.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 3 December 2005 @ 8:13 PM
Yes, you can find wolves in places they are *biologically* adapted to; that was part of my point. same with sharks and cats. (to put it in the most simplistic way I can: They adapted biologicaly, humans adapted technolgicaly)
Also remember that “cats” is not a species. There are mountain lions, tigers, pumas etc that are biologically adapted to each of their ecosystems whereas humans are a single species that have used technology to adapt to almost every ecosystem.
Also, hunter/gatherer peoples used watercraft, lived in artic ecosystems and colonized many an island. The fact that they didn’t colonize *every* island, Antartica, the bottom of the ocean or outer space is irrelevent. Actually, it serves to re-inforce my point, as today we can see that by continuing the process they started (our technological “evolution”) we are able to colonize and/or exploit all of these places.
Even if clothing didn’t warm us faster than our biological evolution would have by “much more than a few hundred thousand years,” as you state, that is still a few hunderd thousand years that other species would have had time to adapt and evolve as well. Also, in contrast to putting on clothing, the transition to denser fur would have been gradual and would have allowed us only to expand our range slowly.
Comment by michael — 3 December 2005 @ 9:15 PM
Tools is what humans do. We make tools. Our brains are designed for the ability to do so. Other species use tools to obtain things from where they can’t get to. So do we. Clothing is a tool. Fire is a tool. Shelter is a tool. A rock is a tool. A stick is a tool.
That’s what we do. It’s biological.
Comment by WackyMorningDJ — 3 December 2005 @ 10:29 PM
I fail to see how a few thousand years would have better prepared anything. They didn’t know we were coming. And even another million years wouldn’t have allowed them to evolve a fear of humans, not until they saw one.
Mike is correct. Tools are biological for humans. Should we now deny a sabertooth tiger his claws would you? After all, it is an unfair advantage. Why, the giant birds all got killed because of it. Do you think we should go out and declaw every cat we see because of it? When old species are out competed they die, it happens. But more to the point…what is your point? What are you trying to say. Don’t simplify your points for us, tell us your main point. What is your thesis?
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 3 December 2005 @ 10:38 PM
“Depends on how you define wild. Is the use of controlled burns to increase deer forage wild? Is agriculture wild? what about Mayan architecture?
I don’t see any of the above as being a part of “completely wild” land. Remember, some 125 million people lived here in precolumbian times and many of these people built civilizations.”
the mayans and hte incas are really the only ones.
the fact is, the indians lived with the earth. i know it’s hard for anyone to even believe that, since we are so alienated from the earth, but it’s possbile.
i’ll post some facts…i hope they aren’t too long.
Only 150 years ago, the Great Plains were a vast, waving sea of grass stretching from the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico to the boreal forest of Canada, from the oak-hickory forests of the Ozarks to the Rocky Mountains. Bison blanketed the plains-it has been estimated that 60 million of the huge, shaggy beasts moved across the grassy ocean in seasonal migrations. Throngs of Pronghorn and Elk also filled this Pleistocene landscape. Packs of Gray Wolves and numerous Grizzly Bears followed the tremendous herds.
In 1830, John James Audubon sat on the banks of the Ohio River for three days as a single flock of Passenger Pigeons darkened the sky from horizon to horizon. He estimated that there were several billion birds in that flock. It has been said that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic seaboard to the MissisÂsippi River without touching the ground so dense was the deciduous forest of the East.
At the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, an estimated 100,000 GrizÂzlies roamed the western half of what is now the United States. The howl of the wolf was ubiquitous. The California Condor sailed the sky from the Pacific Coast to the Great Plains. Salmon and sturgeon populated the rivers. Ocelots, Jaguars, and Jaguarundis prowled the Texas brush and SouthwestÂern mountains and mesas. Bighorn Sheep ranged the mountains of the RockÂies, the Great Basin, the Southwest, and the Pacific Coast. Ivory-billed Woodpeckers and Carolina Parakeets filled the steamy forests of the Deep South. The land was alive.
East of the Mississippi, giant Tulip Poplars, American Chestnuts, oaks, hickories, and other trees formed the most diverse temperate deciduous forest in the world. In New England, White Pines grew to heights rivaling the BrobdÂingnagian conifers of the far West. On the Pacific Coast, redwood, hemlock, Douglas-fir, spruce, cedar, fir, and pine formed the grandest forest on Earth.
In the space of a few generations we have laid waste to paradise. The TallÂgrass Prairie has been transformed into a corn factory where wildlife means the exotic pheasant. The Shortgrass Prairie is a grid of carefully fenced cow pasÂtures and wheatfields. The Passenger Pigeon is no more; the last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The endless forests of the East are tame woodlots. With few exceptions, the only virgin deciduous forest there is in tiny museum pieces of hundreds of acres. Fewer than one thousand Grizzlies remain. The last three condors left in the wild were captured and imprisoned in the Los AnÂgeles Zoo. (An expensive reintroduction effort has since been started.) ExÂcept in northern Minnesota and northwestern Montana, wolves are known as scattered individuals drifting across the Canadian and Mexican borders. Four percent of the peerless Redwood Forest remains and the ancient forests of Oregon are all but gone. The tropical cats have been shot and poisoned from our Southwestern borderlands. The subtropical Eden of Florida has been transmogrified into hotels and citrus orchards. Domestic cattle have grazed bare and radically altered the composition of the grassland communities of the West, displacing Elk, Moose, Bighorn Sheep, and Pronghom and leading to the virtual extermination of Grizzly Bear, Gray Wolf, Cougar, and other “varmints.” Dams choke most of the continent’s rivers and streams.
Comment by Scott — 3 December 2005 @ 10:39 PM
Michael — humans are as limited in their growth into new niches as any other species. Species grow into any new niche they can. Land animals began with amphibians that could move into the terrestial niche. Wolves move where they are capable of moving, as do humans. We can’t expand anywhere. Just as a shark can’t crawl on land and start taking over, we can’t start expanding under the sea. Of course, we could adapt ourselves to live underwater (recreating our own terrain under the sea isn’t expanding into the aquatic niche, it’s recreating our niche in a new location), but then again, sharks could evolve into amphibians. To say that our technology allows us to expand anywhere is like saying a wolf’s teeth, or a shark’s fin, allow it to expand anywhere. It’s an adaptation we’ve come up with, just like wolf teeth and shark fins, and it allows us to expand into new territories, just like wolf teeth and shark fins. It also has its limits, just like wolf teeth and shark fins.
Was the first American big cat well adapted to the Americas? No, it took them time to become biologically adapted, during which time they relied on other adaptations. And when humans enter a new area, they also take time to adapt to their new situation. But humans have also become biologically adapted to their new settings. When moving into northern climes, human melanin levels dropped, to allow more sunlight to be absorbed as vitamin D. In high altitudes, lungs and chests became larger to accomodate lower oxygen levels in the air. In colder areas, people become shorter and stockier to conserve body warmth. Et cetera ad nauseum. Humans do adapt biologically, though, like any other animal, that takes some time to sort out.
I’m with Mike and Ben. Scott–yes, the Native Americans eventually became very much a part of the ecology that they eventually adapted to. Like any other animal, they learned to do that over time, by finding their place in a new world. That process wasn’t always kind, but eventually it worked out, as it always does. Cahokia, the Hohokam and some other civilized burps weeded out civilization where it arose, leaving only well-adapted tribes to inherit the earth. Native Americans were not always ecological saints. What sustainability they possessed was the result of that long process of finding their place–the same process that wolves, sharks and big cats followed before them. The path of any alpha predator in a new land.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 December 2005 @ 10:58 PM
Vine Deloria’s book Red Earth, White Lies does a great job of debunking the North American overkill theory, and also has strong arguments that humans did not migrate here over the Bering land bridge, but either came in boats or were here much earlier.
Comment by Ran — 4 December 2005 @ 8:23 PM
I’m not ready to throw out the Bering Land Bridge just yet. It’s still pretty obvious Native Americans came from Asia, the question is when. A lot of these pre-Clovis sites are coming back, consistently, with 30,000 years ago, which is a lot older than previously believed. It’s becoming a lot more difficult to maintain the primacy of Clovis. So, what does that mean? Kennewick Man makes me wonder if there might be some relation between pre-Clovis peoples to the Ainu in Japan, who also have “caucasoid” features that are very curious for being so far away from the rest of the race kline. That would suggest that the Clovis replaced an earlier population….
All speculaton at this point. Not enough evidence to say much of anything. Deloria’s really strong on a lot of points, but I found her “refutation” of the Bering land bridge fairly weak.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 December 2005 @ 10:18 AM
Scott, tribes in today’s US practiced agriculture too; not just the southern city builders which, by the way, include more than the Incas and Mayas. But I’m getting sidetracked here…
Jason said: “To say that our technology allows us to expand anywhere is like saying a wolf’s teeth, or a shark’s fin, allow it to expand anywhere. It’s an adaptation we’ve come up with, just like wolf teeth and shark fins, and it allows us to expand into new territories, just like wolf teeth and shark fins.”
Yes, but with several very important differences. The key difference being that unlike the wolf’s teeth or the shark’s fin, we can rapidly discard or pick up our technological adaptations. Here’s an example I’ve taken from a study done a few years ago in Utah: One difference between between humans and deer is that our bodies are built to dissipate heat much faster (less fur/hair, more sweat glands, etc.) This means that during the hottest time of the summer humans have an advantage, and can (in groups of 2-3) chase and catch overheating deer. There are some qualifiers to this example - ranges of vegetation density, time and distance of chase - but being built to dissipate heat during endurance exercise gives us a definite advantage in hotter temperatures. However, in the winter this is not the case. The deer survive the colder weather just fine because what was a disadvantage (heat retention) in the summer is advantagous in the winter. However, for humans, the summertime advantage becomes a fatal disadvantage in the winter…Unless we use/create technology (clothing).
Similarly, the shape and structure of the wolf’s teeth must strike a balance between several objectives.
for a quick example:
-holding/containing animal
-piercing flesh
-breaking bones
-softening muscle tissues for digestion
They must also be durable enough not to break or wear prematurely, and not so large that they would impede other tasks, etc, etc…
Wolf’s teeth will be limited by many factors and
Even at their best, these teeth will be limitating factors for the wolf in many ways, including diet.
In contrast, a human’s diet is not nearly as limited by his/her teeth. We can manufacture several types of obsidian spearheads for different hunting/meat processing tasks, and can also heat, grind or otherwise process vegetation that would not be as chewable/digestable otherwise.
Relative to any other species, humans can rapidly adapt to live anywhere and eat anything due to tools and techniques that, unlike genetic advantages, can be adapted, created, and discarded rapidly.
Another advantage to say, clothing made from animal skins is that our bodies do not have to do the work required to produce and maintain that extra bio-mass.
Jason:
I agree that people do adapt biologically, however, these adaptations are less significant than our technological adaptation in terms of our expansion. Other animals had only biological adaptation.
The claim that technology is biological as WackyMorningDJ did makes obscures the fact that we are separate from our technology.
Comment by michael — 5 December 2005 @ 8:15 PM
Just to quickly pick a couple of flaws here
1) The argument keeps returning to ‘no proof’ but it would be quite hard to prove the hypothesis that humans were responsible for overkilll. That doesn’t take away from it being the most likely hypothesis. In other words you can’t do what you are doing here, using a lack of proof to dismiss what remains the most likely hypothesis
2) The argument about the Saber tooth tiger. There is a hypothesis that man may have delibretly sought to exterminate the tiger - this would make sense we have exterminated other predators that we considered to be in competition with us (eg both eagles and wolves were wiped out across Europe because they took sheep). That aside the extinction could also have been caused indirectly - by eliminating major fauna man removed the tigers food source to below the critical level.
Comment by Andrew — 6 December 2005 @ 12:32 PM
No, it’s not a matter of lack of evidence at all. There’s evidence aplenty. But the evidence doesn’t point towards overkill–and, given the evidence we have, overkill is NOT the most likely hypothesis. Really, I think it’s the LEAST likely. It’s an anachronism, like your argument about the saber-toothed tiger. You’re taking the behavior of agricultural humans under the pressures of an agricultural economy, and projecting them onto foragers. No human forager group hunts its competitors. Why? It’s a waste of energy that could be put to better use; any forager group that tried would wipe itself out long before the predator. The forces on agriculture are different. There’s lots of people and energy to be expended, so they’re capable of such a campaign, and their negative marginal returns makes such competition a lethal threat, so not only are they capable of conducting such a campaign, they are compelled to. Foragers have neither the ability, nor the inclination. That makes the whole scenario an anachronism.
There’s tons of evidence to indicate the scenario I’ve outlined above, but there’s nothing indicating the overkill hypothesis. It’s not the most likely hypothesis at all. It’s quite unlikely.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 December 2005 @ 12:39 PM
This is a lovely site with an excellent discussion. Three p’s from my pov:
1) Agriculture is a hard word to define. The gap between hunting/gathering and agriculture is nebulous and indistinct. Many h/g systems are far more complex and technologically sophisticated than many ag systems.
2) Paleo man was a fantastic hunter, the cleverest and deadliest predator the Earth has ever seen. We should be careful not to underestimate ourselves.
3) Early New World residents had more than spears. Their principal ecosystem manipulation tool was fire. The torchbearer hugely altered ecosystems worldwide. And ever since we squelched and taboo-ized the torch, our ecosystems have really gone to hell.
Comment by Mike the Forester — 6 December 2005 @ 5:16 PM
Agriculture’s quite easy to define, but technological sophistication has nothing to do with it. If most of your food comes from plants that you actively cultivate, then you’re a cultivator. If you pursue that strategy beyond the point of diminishing returns, you’re an agriculturalist. If most of your food comes from sources you do not actively cultivate, then you are a hunter-gatherer. And you’re quite right–many foragers have developed technology that puts agriculturalists to shame. But there’s nothing nebulous about that distinction.
Ever? Hmm, I’m not sure about that. I agree, fantastic hunter … but wolves and sharks and Tyrannosauri Rex weren’t exactly pudding, either.
That’s certainly true of the Iroquois, but you can’t generalize that to the whole of North America, and there’s some indication the Iroquois may have let their pyromania get away with them a bit too much. But you’re right, the campaign in the 1980s to put out all fires has had well-known, disastrous results.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 December 2005 @ 5:35 PM
Ah, but what is cultivation? Orchardists don’t cultivate. They grow semi-permanent, annual crop producing trees. Taroists (Hawiian taro growers) plant, but do not cultivate, nor do they harvest and store annual crops. The plow is very recent (China, ~400 BC). Surely agriculture is older than that. If agriculture is deliberate planting of seed, at what point in human history do you think paleo man figured out how to plant an acorn, or a coconut?
More to the point, when did paleo-Indians in NA figure out that fire aided nut, berry, grain, and root crops? If deliberate, timed burning of nut orchards, prairie pastures, and berry fields every year or two to promote food crops is agriculture, then agriculture is very, very old.
T-Rex was stupid. People are smarter, way smarter, too smart for their own good sometimes. All the sharks in the oceans for eons haven’t done the damage a few deep sea trawlers have done in a few short years. Ditto wolves. Cute, but not as smart, nor nearly so deadly as a human.
Paleo anthropic fire in the Americas was everywhere biomass would burn and humans were present. Read *World Fire* by Dr. SJ Pyne, or *1491-The Americas Before Columbus* by Charles Mann for a zillion supporting references.
For the last 10,000 years neither elk nor wolves have driven the vegetation changes at Yellowstone; it has always been people with fire sticks. People have been the dominant influence on elk and wolf populations for at least that long, too. People are pyromaniacs; it comes with the DNA. We are fire creatures, the only fire creature, the masters of the rock-on-rock spark and flame, and have been for a million years or so.
Comment by Mike the Forester — 6 December 2005 @ 8:36 PM
Jason,
I agree with your contention, well-supported, that paleo-Indians were not directly responsible, via hunting, for many of the Late and post-Pleistocene extinctions. Indirectly is another story, however. Even temporary, partial reductions in a prey base could have a catastrophic effect on large predator populations, already stressed by radical climate changes. I, too, would like to believe the First People were gentle on the land. Evidence is overwhelming is the other direction, though.
Comment by Mike the Forester — 7 December 2005 @ 1:57 AM
For clarification, Jason has said repeatedly that the introduction of any alpha predator will have cascading effects throughout the ecosystem. This does not mean that humans were necessarily evil, nor does it mean that they were necessarily good. Jason has consistently said that it isn’t a matter of being “gentle on the land” or not — it’s something that would likely happen when any alpha predator is introduced into a new ecosystem. In fact, you’ve summarized Jason’s central argument well: “temporary, partial reductions in a prey base could have a catastrophic effect on large predator populations, already stressed by radical climate changes.”
Comment by Devin — 7 December 2005 @ 3:20 AM
Yes, I agree that you agree that I agree and so forth. And I do agree, I only mean to add that fire was the means and manner of the impact. Paleo hunters were effective at driving herds off cliffs, but their most telling impact on the ecosystem was fire. Anthropic fire altered the vegetation in profound ways, which in turn impacted herbivores, which in turn impacted carnivores up the chain.
Yellowstone wolves and elks are a poor example of isolated predator/prey interaction because the scene is too muddied by human influence of long standing. Without humans in the equation, the model does not accurately represent reality.
Comment by Mike the Forester — 7 December 2005 @ 6:15 PM
All:
Anyone who thinks the Americas were sparsely populated, and filled with huge, lonely expanses should check out the book, “1491,” by Charles Mann. There’s a lot more change to the environment that went on in the pre-columbian age than one might think. The book is well written and his arguments are well-supported. Either way, it’s a wealth of information about societies in Pre-columbian America.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 7 December 2005 @ 10:25 PM
The Americas were as populated with people as they could be, no more and no less. Ironically enough, the Americas were also as populated by rabbits as they could be, no more and no less. Same with every animal species. And yes, humans have an effect on the ecosystem. They’re supposed to. It’s no due to humans being poorly designed, evil, or selfish. It’s due to humans being a part of that system. Taking humans out of the equation to determine how ecosystems work is exactly as silly as taking pine trees out of a forest to see how the forest actually works.
How is fire unnatural?
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 8 December 2005 @ 11:26 AM
Exactly. Anthropic fires were natural, even though they were human-ignited. This is more than irony. The word “natural” is almost too laden with erroneous moral values and questionable assumptions to be very useful in this context.
Comment by Mike the Forester — 8 December 2005 @ 9:39 PM
It strikes me that the overkill/overchill argument says more about the arguer’s ideology and polemical intentions than it does about what actually happened. We will probably never know the truth of the matter, so that makes the whole issue a template for us modern types to project our various agendas on. Those who argue against the overkill are more often than not objecting to the implied smear on Native Americans or else trying to uphold the honor of the primitivist lifestyle. Those who argue for it may be trying to justify modern consumption patterns or bolstering a hoary old “the more things change the more they stay the same” ideology.
It’s an interesting argument and a fascinating set of possibilities to ponder, but ultimately, given the lack of true hard evidence either way, these discussions have more to teach us about our own attitudes than they do about neolithic man.
Comment by zoneboss — 20 December 2005 @ 8:56 AM
sorry if i sound harsh or ignorant, as i’d prefer to be gentle and informed and have that come across in the post…
why do people consider fire, clothes, atal atals, etc as natural as wolf fangs but then go ahead and oppose agriculture? i’m having trouble wrapping my head about this idea. is it because you oppose agriculture/modern technology’s impact on the rest of this planet’s beings? that’s why i’d do it, but judging from how some of you are willing to write off the megafauna in order to adapt to the Americas’ ecosystems it seems like you don’t. sorry to give you a stream of consciouness, i’m writing an archaeology final paper on the overchill/overkill/both issue.
another issue to clarify- why do you, and by you i mean just the people on this board, not all anarcho-primitivists, choose the computer to communicate?
sweet site
Comment by Bajer — 21 December 2005 @ 6:48 AM
Hey Bajer –
Welcome!
I think you will find on reading more that ‘we’ oppose agriculture because it is an unsustainable technology that leads to intensification of even more unsustainable techniques, social mechanisms, etc.
What you won’t find, from the ‘core’ group here is an accusation of agriculture being ‘unnatural’. in fact, if it exists on this planet it is ‘natural’ but that does not mean that it is above reproach or automatically ‘good’, or sustainable.
Janene
BTW Good Luck on the paper. What angle are you taking on it, if I may ask?
Comment by Janene — 21 December 2005 @ 9:51 AM
Janene nailed it. We’re fine with technology in principle, but there are good technologies and bad technologies. Agriculture sets off a positive feedback loop of unsustainability. That doesn’t translate into “all technology is bad” at all. That’s a non sequitur.
Gutenberg’s printing press changed the world. It sparked the Renaissance, and formed our concept of “the nation.” It was ideally suited for such autocratic measures, because it allowed a single author to dictate to a large audience uninterrupted.
In many ways, the internet is the opposite of that. We all read, and we all write. It is not the dictatorship of one author to many readers, but the collaboration of many reader-authors. That collaboration has lent the essence of the online medium to the birth of open source: a tribal technology if ever there was one. The ideals of open source are the same ideals of primitivism: openness, sharing, community, and the great project of building something together. Wikis, blogs, Creative Commons and open source software are all manifestations of that. That’s something we want to be part of, and something we want to support.
Finally, the barrier to entry is low. We can afford to publish online in ways we couldn’t otherwise. We reach more people this way, more effectively, and at lower cost. All in all, I would consider the computer a “good” technology, if only we could find a more sustainable and ecologically-friendly way to manufacture them. That’s by no means an intractable problem: the essence of a computer is just a whole bunch of things you can turn on and off really fast.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 December 2005 @ 10:49 AM
oi, good to be postin’ on this here site and thanks Jason and Jalene for making me feel welcome. btw, i’m going to a two week permaculture class over winter break with StarHawk. is there disagreement in the GA community over permaculture? is it being talked about?
the position i take in the overchill/overkill paper is a middle ground, that both were contributing factors to the Megafauna’s demise. we know humans can be voracious hunters, and those Clovis points are desgined for one thing: taking down animals so big that sabre tooths can’t touch them. in the same breath, a warming climate has been effectively argued to change Megafauna habitat to the point where resource scarcity causes increased inter-Megafauna competition and crowding out. the two aren’t by any means mutually exclusive, it’s just the scientists in this debate get overly defensive of their positions, acting as if to say “my theory is completely right, leaving no room for your opinion to be correct”.
here’s something nobody has mentioned yet…
“Another climate change factor to consider is its possible interferences with Megafauna reproductive cycles. With the increase in seasonality, the Megafauna’s characteristically long gestation cycle was made less practical. They depend on correlated environmental cues to determine mating season. Getting the time right is key, so that the offspring can enjoy birth during the most optimal period of the year. With increasing seasonality, animals must have spent time they on the reproductive cycle just getting insinc with the changing climate, which could lower the birth rate and contribute to the Megafauna extinction.”- me, from my paper
later
Comment by Bajer — 22 December 2005 @ 2:58 AM
Very true, and any new alpha predator is going to shake thngs up. But, there were people in North America before the Clovis, and most of the extinctions were well underway even before they got there. Obviously, a good hunter’s spear is going to be very good at hunting. But we’re talking about thousands of people, not even millions–much less billions. When I first heard the Overkill theory, I laughed, because how could such a tiny population wreak so much havoc? They must’ve been dedicated to it. I imagined weekly meetings of the whole human race, where they’d coordinate strategy. It would be like squirrels arguing whether squirrels are causing the mass extinction now.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 December 2005 @ 10:56 AM
So-called technology is also self-limiting, as we are witnessing in the current wholesale destruction of the planet resulting from the industrial age. It is quite clear that as the industrial age has increased the rate of human adaptation compared to the agricultural age, so too have the limiting factors become apparent at an increased rate. Should we develop functional and widespread nanotechnology, it is obvious that the limiting factors will manifest themselves in, well, nanoseconds.
That is also evident in nuclear weapons; the inherent destructive capacity is the reason they have not been widely deployed. (Yet. There’s no accounting for insanity. However it is interesting that LSD was isolated the same year that they split the atom. There is some merit to the old doctrine of signatures: a system that evolves a poison will evolve an antidote in proximity.)
Every “evil� attributed to technology is precisely a limiting factor of that particular type of technology. If our technology were sustainable, limiting factors would be slower to arise. I guess that is kind of the definition of “sustainable�: the comeuppance is slower. Less painful, if you define painful as a sudden backlash. “Good� ideas, like genetic evolution, just take longer to blow up in your face.
Simply: An adaptation’s limiting factors arise at a rate proportional to the rate of adaptation. “Artificial� technology is not evil, just quick.
Also applies to the introduction of foreign species to an ecosystem: sudden introduction, sudden backlash.
Fwiw, genetic evolution is sometimes faster than technology. Witness antibiotic resistance, which funnily enough is also considered evil, but only because it is faster than we are.
Using technology to decry the abuses of technology is a limiting factor of technology, made available by the technology itself. It’s a no-brainer, really. Poison, antidote.
Fast adaptation, fast backlash.
Sorry for long post
Comment by man + computer — 22 December 2005 @ 6:43 PM
That doesn’t prove technology is self-eliminating, it proves that technology is subject to diminishing returns.
I notice, for instance, that you never addressed some of our greatest inventions: the digging stick, the atlatl, etc. These things have very high marginal returns.
You seem to be trying to draw a conclusion that technology is bad, but your evidence seems to want to draw a conclusion that too much technology is unmanageable.
Or, to put another way, it seems akin to getting a tummy-ache from gorging on chocolate, and thus concluding that chocolate is a vile poison that no one should ever touch under any circumstances.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 December 2005 @ 6:48 PM
Jason, he never said that technology is self-eliminating. He said that technology is self-limiting. His argument is complementary to yours, not contrary to it. I found his post very insightful, and was surprised to see your response.
Sometimes it seems you have trouble discerning whether people are agreeing with you or not… you’ve taken a disagreeing tone with me before on several occasions when I was actually agreeing with you. The defensiveness I’ve seen in some of your posts (I’ve seen a pattern, but heretofore have left it unaddressed) does not need to accompany your arguments — let the truth speak for itself. Disparagement of opposing perspectives and dismissiveness only makes your argument weaker.
- Devin
Comment by Devin — 22 December 2005 @ 8:11 PM
Pleistocene mega-fauna populations may have been weakened by a meteorite impact.
Comment by locke — 12 December 2007 @ 12:49 PM