Dr. David Gwynn

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906 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 21 Dec

Dr. David Gwynn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The Ancients · Ice Age America · 21 Nov 2024 podcast

They probably didn't mess with us. I mean, we wouldn't have been much of a meal. Not when they can go after a bison or a mammoth, for goodness sakes. There's just a whole lot more meat on the bone for the other prey.

And they tended to hunt around what's known today, I think it's the Los Angeles County Museum, the La Brea Tar Pits, very classic environment in which animals would come and these folks would be ambush hunters. jump out, grab them by the throat, and then hang on as the animal tried to twist its way out. If there were people that were eaten by saber-tooths, we have no evidence of it.

I could only imagine it would have been over very fast.

Well, I'm at a disadvantage here because I actually haven't seen that film. Okay. But I'll answer your question as best I can, which is to say, yes, there were all sorts of small mammals in North America. And let's take it one step further. If you're coming into an environment

that you're unfamiliar with and you're a hunter-gatherer, you're not gonna be terribly picky about what your next meal is. And so if there were small mammals that humans encountered and that they were able to kill. We don't want to put the vision of people killing cartoon squirrels and eating them in your listeners' heads.

But yeah, these folks were probably fairly generalized foragers, which is to say that they were eating up and down the body size chain. So small mammals, turtles, large mammals, yeah. They were probably hunters of great strategy and tactics, but also opportunistic. If the resource was there, they're going to take advantage of it.

Well, I mean, I think that just makes a lot of sense. You don't have a ready food supply. You're not necessarily building up a surplus, right? You haven't got corn that you harvested last fall that's still available in your corn bins. So you will take advantage. Now, at the same time, we know from slightly later in history,

prehistory where we've got a large bison kills where bison, because they were sort of susceptible as a herd animal to being driven into arroyos or fall into big pits, natural pits, you know, solution cavities and the like. You're not able to control how many animals get killed.

And so you're not necessarily able, given the numbers of hunters that you have, to be able to fully exploit the amount of meat, right? So some stuff gets left behind, but certainly you're going to take what you can, as much as you can. And because these are highly mobile groups, they're also thinking a bit in terms of how much can you carry?

Yeah, you can kill an elephant, but are you going to be able to make use of all six tons of it? You know, you move the whole camp there and you spend, oh, probably several weeks, you know, roasting it on the barbecue. But, you know, at a certain point, it's just you move on. That's depending on how often they made these kills.

And one of the things that's really becoming clear, I mean, think about it. You're a hunter-gatherer. And let's just simplify it. You've got a stick with a sharp rock at the end of it. And you're staring down the very long nozzle of a Pleistocene elephant, a mammoth, which weighs six tons.

One of the things that we've done recently is a fair amount of experimental work with their weaponry, their projectile points. And what we discovered, and obviously we weren't using these on mammoths because, well, they've been extinct for 10,000 years.

But using experimental conditions that as best we could replicated the conditions of hunting a mammoth in terms of thickness, the material that you're going to throw your spears into, and that sort of thing. These projectile points that they were using, these so-called Clovis points, Absolutely could bring down an animal. There's no question about it, right? These were weapons.

On the other hand, what we discovered was that they probably weren't all, they were described, they have been described as these quote unquote magnificent killing things, these magnificent killing tools. Turns out they weren't all that magnificent. When you think about, and we have data on this, when you think about the skin thickness of a woolly mammoth,

A spear shot into it has to get through all the hair. It's got to get through the hide. It's got to get through layers of subcutaneous fat. And what we discovered with the experimental stuff is that, well, penetrating distance isn't very good. These things can go in about maybe 18 centimeters. So not very far.

Well, all the vital organs of a mammoth are basically hidden behind a picket fence of large ribs, right? And... scapula, other large bones. And so these weapons were effective. There's no question about it. We know that they went after some of these mammals and they were successful, but they just weren't successful all that often.

And moreover, what we realized, when you look at the wear patterns on these tools, when you look at the breakage patterns on these tools, they're probably more like Swiss army knives rather than weapons made specifically for killing elephants. The stereotype of these things as being highly specialized weapons, it actually doesn't make a lot of sense.

If you're a highly mobile hunter-gatherer and you've got a limited amount of stuff that you can carry, wouldn't it be better to carry a tool that can be used for all manner of different tasks rather than a tool that's solely for the purpose of bringing down six-ton animals?

Because one of the things that we know from Bonner Day hunter-gatherers is that going after a really big game like that is actually a low probability of success activity. So more often, you're shooting a deer, you're prying open a turtle. And so if you've got that Swiss Army knife, you've got the tool that you need for all occasions and

If on occasion you run into an elephant, you can use it on that. But don't count on it being all that lethal because the penetrating power of these things is just not that great.

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