Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The big cats of the African savanna cannot cool themselves in this way and therefore
doze during the day and hunt at night, when it is cooler. It is only much later, with the
safety provided by long-distance spear throwing, that our Middle Palaeolithic fore-
bears became more proficient at hunting larger animals, and by Upper Palaeolithic
and Mesolithic times, the use of pit traps and other snares became common. High in
the semi-arid Kaimur Ranges of the Vindhyan Hills in north-central India, north of
the Middle Son Valley, Mesolithic rock shelters show paintings of pit traps in which
a now extinct Indian rhinoceros is caught. The Bega hill people in this region today
remain hunter-gatherers, and they are adept at making fire using just a wooden base
with a slight hollow in it to position kindling and a thin straight stick of hard wood
placed vertically in the hollow and rotated rapidly between the palms of the hands.
Flames ensue in several minutes.
17.5.1 Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions in Australia
The Aboriginal people of seasonally wet tropical northern Australia inhabit a land that
is a rainless desert for more than half the year. They have long used fire as a hunting
tool and can gauge when and where to light the fire so that it remains under control,
using their local knowledge of when the winds will change direction during the day
and blow the fire back onto burnt land, which acts as a fire-break (Haynes,
1991
).
So widespread was the practice of burning the land throughout Australia, including
Tasmania, at the time of European contact that the archaeologist Rhys Jones (
1968
)
coined the phrase 'firestick farming', although many would cavil at this exuberant use
of the word 'farming', which normally connotes cultivation of the land for growing
food crops. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the human use of fire would have
greatly facilitated hunting in a variety of ways, including stampeding animals towards
the hunters, removing the tall, dead grass and facilitating the growth of palatable,
new green grass at the start of the wet season. This brings us to a hotly debated set of
questions. Were the widespread and well-documented extinctions of the larger animals
in the Americas, Eurasia and Australia towards the end of the Pleistocene a result
of climate change, human predation, human modification of the environment through
burning or some other natural catastrophe, such as meteorite impact or volcanic
eruption? Needless to say, any of these factors may have operated at any one time and
place, either individually or in combination with one or more of the others.
Some of the oldest evidence for Quaternary animal extinctions comes from Aus-
tralia, where 90 per cent of the larger kangaroos, together with other giant species, had
vanished by around 45,000 years ago, shortly after the time that humans first occupied
the continent. However, it is curious that although hunting is claimed as a major cause
of the demise of the Australian megafauna, once humans arrived on that continent
some 50,000 years ago (Miller et al.,
1999
; Roberts et al.,
2001
; Gillespie,
2008
),
