Mammoth hunting

How did the paleoIndians kill mammoths? Clearly they did--there are bones with spear points in them--and thoroughly enough that there aren't anymore mammoths. Elephant hide is almost half an inch thick, and mammoths corpses have twice that. Even with an atlatl you're not going to get a quick kill through that. You'd need lots of spears--and a wounded mammoth might have opinions about that--or lots of time for the critter to bleed out. And then you have to skin it pretty quickly, before the guts start to spoil the meat.

Frison published an article in American Antiquity (Vol 54) in 1989: "Experimental Use of Clovis Weaponry and Tools on African Elephants" based on work from a few years earlier. (Found via this post.)

The team took advantage of an elephant cull to have freshly dead and as yet unskinned elephants to test the tools on. Turns out Clovis points are kind of fragile (archaeologists knew this already), and getting the spear to hold together properly takes some care. You have to design it right, and even then you may have to rework the spear or the point after use. They did some slinging from 15 to 20 meters--two to three seconds away at elephant top speed.

"Proper use of the atlatl and dart requires considerable movement on the part of the hunter. ... In the case of actual hunting, this movement would very likely attract the attention of an animal whose subsequent reactions would not always be entirely predictable."

"Clovis weaponry cannot be depended on to drop quickly and reliably a charging matriarch or even younger and smaller elephants"

"Individual members of an elephant family continually wander away from the protection of the matriarch and the family. Careful stalking of such animals would put the hunter in a favorable spot to inflict crippling or lethal wounds that would eventually lead to the deaths without arousing the suspicion of the matriarch and bringing to bear the unbrella of protection offered by the family. This kind of procurement strategy involves careful stalking, a minimum of noise and excitement, and patience once a spear has inflicted a wound on the animal."

There's footage of an isolated elephant being brought down with spears by a group of Africans, without atlatls (there's no evidence they ever used them there). I can't swear to the provenance of that footage, though.

Frison tested butchering too. It was straightforward; even the legs came apart fairly easily. But you still need a lot of people, even if only to carry the meat away.

Yes, we went to Horicon today.