Prehistoric hunting method shows how woolly mammoths went extinct

The woolly mammoth went extinct at least partly due to hunting – and now, around 10 thousand years later, scientists have worked out how humans wiped them out.

The weapon preferred by humans back then was the pike, and new research has uncovered how people were able to utilise them in such a way as to take down the enormous animals.

The team behind a new study published in the journal Plos One found that rather than being thrown or held by hunters to attack mammoths, there was a rather more ingenious method which had the best results.

The research shows that the Clovis people living in the Americas around 13,000 years ago would have provoked huge animals like the mammoth and the giant bison to charge them after planting pikes in the ground.

With the weapons planted with the sharp point upwards, the hunters guided the animals towards them and they were then impaled. Using this method, the hunters could exert far more force than throwing or stabbing with the weapon.

Dr Scott Byram of the University of California, Berkley, is a co-author of the study. He said: “We are only now recognising that people in many cultures have hunted or defended against megafauna with planted pikes for thousands of years.

“It follows that pikes would have been preferred against aggressive megafauna,” he said.

The team pointed to examples of paintings and written counts of hunts which feature descriptions of ground-based pikes, as well as conducting experiments using replicas of the weapons used at the time.

Prof Metin Eren at the Kent State University anthropology department, who was not involved in the work: “Of course, the major problem is that archaeologists have never discovered any sort of Clovis wooden spear or dart shaft, much less any hard evidence that spears were actually used in a pike-like fashion. We really need to make sure our conclusions don’t outrun our experiments, and, more importantly, the actual archaeological record.”

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