Reid Farmer has been sending many good papers and emails-- so many in fact I have invited him to join the blog, which I hope he will next week. Meanwhile go here and here and here for some good early American stuff. (The last has a lot of links to other papers as well).
Most of this material relates to post- Clovis humans and "blitz" megafauna extinction, though as Reid points out there is nothing mutually exclusive about one population of humans coming down the coast while another, perhaps with a better big game toolkit, and definitely with dogs-- I'll have more on that later-- enters swiftly via the ice- free corridor.
One of the papers in the last link there is described with a remarkable line, though: "The authors of "Megafauna Extinction" posit that if early North American hunters focused merely on hunting relatively small animals such as rabbits and deer, accidental encounters with big megafauna like mammoths were common enough to result in megafaunal kills".
To which Matt Mullenix, who will also be posting here soon, replied: "Do you ever get the impression that lots of guys who speculate from scant evidence about the nature of Man The Hunter are not, in fact, hunting men themselves?
"Accidental encounters" with megafauna while hunting rabbits on the open plain? Please!
"Whilst I and my fellows enjoyed a day's bird hunting with our bolas, Grog here tripped upon a sleeping mammoth and had the poor beast lassoed before it could mount a commendable defense!
"All in a day's work, my boy!"
Also apropos here: the dean of high plains archaeology, George Frison (says Reid "Only archaeologist I ever knew who owned and operated his own backhoe) who IS a hunter and wrote the book on it, says: ".. too many investigators think they have analyzed hunting by declaring that prehistoric humans addressed their hunger simply by "leaving camp and killing an animal".
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