i remember reading how eskimos would wrap sharp bone fragments in balls of fat and leave them for polar bears.. then they would follow the bears until
they died of internal bleeding.
Elephants (and mammoths probably) are also herbivores that chew their food. Sometimes that food is a whole tree. Using the polar bear sharp bone strategy would be like feeding a razor blade to a wood chipper.
Isnt there a similar thing where they put a blood soaked knife in the snow blade up and a wild wolf will come and lick the blood off, cutting their tongue on the blade and keep lapping at it not realising its their blood until they pass out.
It’s the arctic and a polar bear. Is it fair? Well it’s about as fair as fishing. And if they don’t do either they’ll see how fair starving on a block of ice is
Pikes were used much the same way right? Surprised I never put the two together, ancient humans weren't stupid so of course they'd realize that was a better way of causing harm than just throwing it. Not to mention their use of leverage in weapons like the Atlatl. No clue on the timespan of these things but I do find this stuff interesting.
Many people have a silly idea in their heads that stone-age humans could not be as innovative and smart as we can because their technology was less advanced than ours.
They also look at an expertly-knapped spearhead like the ones in the thumbnail and think they could do that with a couple of rocks they find in their backyard.
These ancestors of ours were smart, they were creative thinkers, they made stone tools at an expert level that the average person today could not even hope to replicate. I love finding out new ways they were able to innovate.
The grooves carved into each point could allow it to slide down the shaft upon impact. A fixed point, by contrast, would be more likely to shatter when it hit dense material, especially bone.
This is really interesting. And to further illustrate just how much we have no idea and might be wildly wrong, there's an incredible book, All Yesterdays, which reimagines prehistoric animals in interesting new ways. The second half of the book shows possible recreations of contemporary animals based solely on their skeletons to really drive home the point at how much guessing is involved in this field. Some of the images can be found here.
How do you think they got the mammoth to run into the trap of spears?
Also, in case it turned towards you, you'd want a spear in your hands to make him turn.
Edit: judging by the picture in the post, if you couldn't run away, you might jam the back end into the ground beside/behind yourself and hold up the point so at least he'd be wounded when he squashed you
Yeah, if your main form of offense/defense is that you are: large, and have massive fuck-off tusks on your front then charging seems to be a pretty good go to.
Everyone you'd met was probably with you at the time. So their response would be, "yeah we know. Shut up about that mammoth already. It's been two weeks and we have to go kill another mammoth."
So if the theory is that spears were planted in the ground rather than thrown, that means there was probably a ton of them in the ground and mammoths were chased into the trap.
You might be right, but i think it also has to do with the charging behavior of those animals. The plant a spear strat seems less effective if your prey is better able to change directions.