Reframing Prehistoric Human-Proboscidean Interactions: on the Use and Implications of Ethnohistoric Records for Understanding the Productivity of Hunting Megaherbivores

Abstract

The role that humans played in the extinction of Pleistocene proboscideans is highly controversial. Ethnohistoric records of elephant hunting, in concert with theoretical rationales, are often used as proxy evidence to support the view that ancient humans regularly and efficiently targeted large-sized proboscideans to the point of extinction. This paper examines the socioeconomic and technological contexts of elephant hunting in contemporary and ethnohistoric records to show how these circumstances influenced the scale of harvest, productivity, and valuation of elephants. Quantitative and qualitative evidence derived from some of these records are used to analyze the efficiency of elephant capture using traditional hunting technologies (spears, poisoned projectiles, traps, and drives). This analytical framework provides a systematic method for evaluating the productivity of proboscidean predation. Results show that prior to the widespread use of firearms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the acquisition of elephants, irrespective of the traditional hunting technology used, was a dangerous, high-cost activity often associated with a high-risk of hunting failure. In the ethnographic record, elephant hunting is consistently associated with prestige-seeking among egalitarian hunter-gatherers. Although the analysis presented here is derived from hunting episodes that involved modern elephants, the physical characteristics and abilities that make these animals expensive and risky to hunt were likely manifested by most Pleistocene proboscideans. Using ethnographic data, a framework for recognizing how prestige hunting is manifested under different ecological and sociopolitical circumstances is provided and offers an alternative and compelling explanation for zooarchaeological patterning of costly prey in the past.