A Hunter's Confession. David Carpenter O.
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of Europe. Much like the diet of modern caribou hunters of the Canadian North, more than half of their food was meat. These ancient cold-weather survivors, the Cro-Magnons, managed to maintain populations all over Europe and northern Asia and later in North America. The quarry was large mammals—mammoths, horses, buffalo, and caribou. And as the availability of big-game animals began to diminish, the ingenuity of the hunters appears to have increased.
I am talking about the Mesolithic age, from approximately 20,000 to 9,000 bc. This is the age during which agriculture began to develop in isolated pockets around the Middle East. But until agriculture took over as the major source of food for tribal societies all over the world, including North America, hunting became increasingly high-tech. The hunters of the Mesolithic era had learned, over the millennia, to hunt in groups and to deploy weapons such as spears and, later, bows and arrows.
Hunting historians who reach the Neolithic age must surely lapse into melancholia, because they are then forced to concede that hunting for subsistence is losing its chic. Around 10,000 bc, the populations of the tribal units on several continents had grown considerably. This population growth coincided with the end of the ice age. With more mouths to feed, tribal groups turned to growing plants and corralling hitherto wild animals. The agricultural revolution took over as mercilessly as a swarm of McDonald’s franchises. Hunting and gathering could support one person per ten square miles. But the farming and animal husbandry that characterized Neolithic agriculture could support about one hundred times that many people.
With the obvious success of advanced hunting techniques, and with the disappearance of traditional habitat owing to the end of the ice age, the great mammals that had fed populations of Homo sapiens for so long went extinct. From dietary evidence gathered at tribal sites of the Neolithic age, we can see a dramatic shift from meat to wheat, barley, legumes, fruit, and nuts. For humans, the age of the Big Meat was relatively short, lasting from about 35,000 bc to perhaps as late as 10,000 bc. There were some big exceptions to this trend, Aboriginal hunters on the Great Plains and in northern Canada and Alaska being among them.
There is some strong evidence that this radical shift from meat to grains and fruit in the Near East, Western Europe, northern Asia, and scattered parts of Africa precipitated a widespread decline in human health. Communicable diseases sprang up, and with the drop in iron levels, anemia and osteoporosis proliferated. The height of early Neolithic peoples declined by about four inches from that of the hunting tribes of the late Paleolithic age, and poorer nutrition seems to be at the heart of this decline.
And so hunting, this time for smaller game animals, continued along the fringes of many tribal groups like a counterculture. In Israel, from the Hakkarmel burial sites, archaeologists have unearthed a stone-age culture from about 12,000 bc. These people, the Natufians, were hunter-gatherers until they collided with the agrarian and herding cultures. By the time of Moses, circa 1250 bc, the Natufian hunters had been wiped out.
As far as we can tell, this seems to have been the fate of most, though certainly not all, hunting cultures throughout the world. In the Near East, around 12,000 bc, hunters began to corral gazelles for later consumption. In Syria, between 11,000 and 10,000 bc, the diet radically shifted from wild gazelles to domesticated goats and sheep. By about 8500 bc, this shift was complete. Around 7000 bc, in what is now Mexico, deer hunting and seasonal plant gathering gave way to maize cultivation. In South America, evidence suggests that Andean tribes cultivated wild plants as early as 5000 bc. Agriculture spread widely after it took hold in this region, and hunter-gatherers began to trade wild meat for beans, maize, and potatoes. The spread of agriculture stopped in the far south, where growing seasons were short.
In large areas of the Near East, China, Thailand, Meso-America, and North Africa and parts of southern Africa, hunter-gatherers and agrarians managed to live side-by-side and trade wild game for plants. Whenever wild game and seasonal plants become scarce, however, hunter-gatherers inevitably would become dependent on agrarians. The agrarian cultures grow as their lands grow, and the hunter-gatherer tribes tend to shrink.
As grasses and grains began to flourish at the end of the last great ice age and spread throughout the world, the agrarian way of life began to dominate, resulting in the fall of hunting. The agrarian mode gained momentum when it became clear that hunting and gathering, and the nomadic life that went with it, was an arduous and doomed existence.
By about ad 1500, hunter-gatherers still retained a hold on about one-third of the world’s land mass (Australia, the northwestern half of North America, the southernmost part of South America, isolated regions in central and southern Africa, and scattered parts of Asia). But the agrarian producers had expanded at a steady rate and commanded the best soil and land for growing and for horticulture, and they had access to the best water. The remaining hunters were frequently stigmatized and marginalized until at last they were seen as the enemy.
The hunter-gatherers who began colonizing North America, however, from about 12,000 to 11,000 bc, were probably more fortunate than other nomadic hunting cultures in their choice of hunting grounds. According to recent theories, they might have been preceded by a contingent of hunters who first settled on the islands of the West Coast around 15,000 years ago. But the largest, most prolific colonists are believed to have descended from Alaska along a newly opened corridor, freed from ice, as though eternal spring had at last been declared.
The first of these people arrived about 11,000 bc at the northwesternmost extension of the Great Plains and gathered, yes, around my hometown of Edmonton. Well, it wasn’t quite Edmonton back then. The great hunters descending from the Bering land bridge and Alaska would search for evidence of Wayne Gretzky in vain. But in that place where, as a young man, I began to wonder where my dad and I had acquired such an avid taste for the hunt, the first pioneers gathered and multiplied, and their newfound success had much to do with hunting.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond tells us that, at this time, the North American West looked like “Africa’s Serengeti Plains . . . with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs, and joined by members of such exotic species as camels and giant ground sloths.” The great wealth of Clovis sites tells us that these huge mammals were hunted with bow and arrow and with impressively large spears. Indeed, the bulkier, more exotic mammals were hunted to extinction. The Clovis hunters continued to follow their quarry southward into the Americas, and as the largest of the mammals began to disappear, various groups of hunter-gatherers evolved into agricultural communities.
This evolution of agricultural settlements was modest and very slow, because in vast areas of the Americas, such as the Great Plains, there was a lot of buffalo and not much of an incentive to move on from hunting and gathering. Hunting cultures persisted into the age of the railroad. For about ten thousand years, their main quarry was the bison. Liz Bryan, in The Buffalo People, put it this way:
Seldom in the history of the Earth has a single animal species had such drastic influence on humanity. Without the bison, it is doubtful if people could have existed at all on the arid plains; certainly not in the way that they did. For the bison was much more than a food source; its hide provided shelter, clothing, shoes, bedding and blankets; its bones were made into tools for shaping stone, scraping hides, working leather and for sewing; its sinews and hair were twisted into cordage; its horns, bladder, paunch and scrotum were used as containers; its dried dung was indispensable as fuel on the treeless plains. Tied inexorably to the movements of the wild herds . . . the people became nomads, following the source of their sustenance in daily and seasonal cycles from the high plains in summer to the shelter of the foothills and valleys in winter. If the herds prospered, the people prospered; when the herds failed, the people starved.
BRYAN RECOUNTS THAT the bison occupied a central role in the mythology of the people who lived off these animals. In their creation stories, the buffalo was an object of worship as the ultimate source of life. These stories constituted a kind of oral scripture that included tales of people and bison intermarrying, which seemed to suggest a mutual ancestry of the two species and the all-encompassing symbiosis between humans and buffalo. Just as the hunting peoples of the Far North maintained a strong spiritual connection to the caribou, so the hunting peoples of the Great Plains were strongly connected to the buffalo.
It is tempting to wonder if, out of this bison-centered