Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. Cregg Madrigal. Suzanne E. Pilaar Birch.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird in the world, became extinct barely a hundred years ago. It has been assumed that the passenger pigeon was equally abundant prior to the European colonization of North America, but some have argued that the bird was nowhere near as common in prehistory. Because so much of what is known is based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Hofman. Torben Rick. Jesus Maldonado.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans have unintentionally and intentionally introduced rodents to islands around the world, sometimes causing local extirpation and extinction of endemic fauna. On the northern California Channel Islands, island deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus), may have arrived as stowaways on Native American canoes at least 10,000 years ago. Following this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Haynes. Janis Klimowicz. Piotr Wojtal.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The characteristics of human-killed and human-scavenged elephant carcasses differ in important ways. The bones of an elephant butchered immediately after humans killed it are identifiably distinct from bones taken from a "ripened" carcasses that was scavenged by humans. With newly killed carcasses, the butchering may be light to full, resulting in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew G. Hill.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over 40 unpublished AMS results on Rangifer, Cervalces, Bootherium, and Ovibos combined with ~80 published assays for Mammuthus and Mammut are used to profile extinction of these taxa in the Southern Great Lakes. At least one result for each of these taxa falls in the Clovis time period, except for Ovibos. Numerous dates for Mammut and Cervalces...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Petraglia.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As early humans and Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, they encountered diverse communities of mammalian faunas in Asia. Here we document hominin migrations out of Africa over the last 500,000 years, discussing the degree to which humans interacted with faunas in Arabia and South Asia. Climate change seems to be the primary reason for the demise...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeline Mackie. Todd Surovell. Matthew O'Brien. Robert Kelly.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the biggest sticking points in the ongoing debate about Clovis subsistence is the small sample size of human killed extinct megafauna. While just over a dozen terminal Pleistocene megafauna kill sites have been identified in North America, there are only two cases where campsites have been found in association with butchered extinct megafauna...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vance Holliday. Jeff Saunders. Jesse Ballenger. David Bustos. Aimee Weber.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The record of extinct fauna from Terminal Pleistocene archaeological sites in the Southwest is stereotypically characterized as mammoth from kill sites. Mammoth kills certainly are well known from the region, including the highest concentration of such sites anywhere in the Americas, but the remains of other extinct megafauna with evidence for human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Marean. Richard Cowling. Janet Franklin.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike some regions, Africa was not subject to massive and abrupt mammalian extinction events in the Late Quaternary, but some African regions were subject to abrupt extinctions of small numbers of species. The coast of South Africa records such an extinction event near the Pleistocene and Holocene boundary. These extinct species were all adapted to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Broughton. Elic Weitzel.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dozens of large mammals such as mammoth, mastodon, and horse (i.e., "megafauna") disappeared in North America at the end of the Pleistocene with climate change and "overkill" the most widely-argued causes. However, the population dynamics of humans and megafauna preceding extinctions have received little attention, even though such information may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eileen Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are among the major predators on the Llano Estacado (Southern High Plains, USA) during the late Pleistocene in competition with a diverse carnivore guild that included the now-extinct giant short-faced bear, saber-tooth cat, American lion, and dire wolf. Direct evidence on bone in the form of cut marks and bone fracture patterns are used in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Perri. Jeffrey Saunders. Greger Larson. Laurent Frantz. Alice Mouton.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dire wolves are an iconic extinct Pleistocene species in the Americas and their interactions with humans at Paleoindian sites has been largely unknown. Here we explore potential interactions between dire wolves and Paleoindians at sites in the San Pedro Valley, Arizona. We also present new radiocarbon dates and the results of our ancient DNA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Rowley-Conwy.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Glacial hunters in northern Europe made heavy flint arrow armatures that resemble modern broadhead hunting arrows. These were used for hunting reindeer, as a number of instances of such arrows lodged in reindeer bones testify. With the spread of forests new animals appeared, among them aurochs. In several instances auroch skeletons have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pat Shipman.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The peopling of Greater Australia at about 65,000 years ago preceded that of Eurasia and differed in several key aspects. First, there were no other hominins in Australia, though modern humans moving into Eurasia encountered Neanderthals, Denisovans, and possibly relict populations of other hominins. Second, the predatory guild in Australia was less...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Braje. Hannah Haas. Matthew Edwards. Jon Erlandson. Steven Whitaker.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) were an important subsistence resource in southern California for 10,000 years, first for coastal Native Americans, then as a commercial shellfishery. By 1993, however, black abalone populations declined dramatically, resulting in the closure of the California fishery. Recently, black abalone are showing signs of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Brooke. Curtis Marean. Jacob A. Harris. Jan A. Venter.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the ecological role of extinct large mammals is an ongoing challenging research problem. The use of species traits (physical and behavioral) to characterize functional communities is becoming common in ecological modelling and is key to understanding the ecological role that species would have filled under historic conditions. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia L. Butler. Jessica Miller. Alexander Stevenson. Dongya Yang. Camilla Speller.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Given the scale of habitat loss from development associated with the Industrial Age, archaeological faunas pre-dating the modern era often represent animal populations extirpated from their former ranges. For example, anadromous salmonid populations in the Pacific Northwest of North America have become extirpated from much of their range in the past...