Simulating Mammoth Hunting and Extinction: Implications for the Late Pleistocene of the Central Russian Plain

Abstract

Mammoths were an important resource for Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. Their remains are frequently found in faunal assemblages, their bones were used for the construction of dwellings, and they figure significantly in Palaeolithic art. Mammoths became extinct in North America at ca. 11,000 BP, in Eurasia at ca. 12,000 BP, and in Siberia at ca. 10,000 BP 1 , and there has been considerable debate as to whether human predation was a causal factor. The computer simulation model described in this paper explores the effect of different types of hunting strategies on mammoth populations in a range of different environmental situations. It demonstrates that mammoth populations are extremely sensitive to predation. The simulation results are discussed with reference to the settlements on the Central Russian Plain. The results agree with Soffer's suggestion that the majority of mammoth remains probably derive from collecting, rather than hunting.

Correcting temporal frequency distributions for taphonomic bias

“…The randomization routine described produced no significant relationship as well (trials ¼ 10,000, p ¼ 0.735). While African elephants are not a perfect analog for Siberian woolly mammoths, it seems hard to believe that human mammoth hunting had no effect on populations of woolly mammoths (see Mithen, 1993), and there is no doubt that Upper Paleolithic humans in Siberia hunted woolly mammoth (Zenin et al, 2003).…”

Trends in Archaeological Simulation

“…Indeed, there is considerable continuity between the editors' theoretical stance and the project proposed by Renfrew in the late 1970s in Trajectory Discontinuity and Morphogenesis: The Implications of Catastrophe Theory for Archaeology (Renfrew 1978) and System Collapse as Social Transformation (Renfrew 1979a). If van der Leeuw and McGlade offer a realignment of simulation with the post-Symbols in Action (Hodder 1982) landscape of archaeological theory, it is not by rejecting systems thinking and wholeheartedly embracing the individual agency to which agent-based modelling so readily lends itself; rather, they seek to distance the science of non-linear systems from "the worst excesses of positivist 'explanation''' while cautioning that excessive focus on 'knowledgeable agents' risks obscuring alternative levels of description at which there are interesting structural similarities in human social organisation (van der Leeuw and McGlade 1997a, p (Mithen 1997) and a GIS-based epidemiological model of the spread of disease in the New World during the Sixteenth Century (Zubrow 1997). As with Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies, the most archaeologically grounded simulations in Time, Process and Structured Transformation in Archaeology are arguably also those that travel least far down the road mapped out in the editorial.…”

Nonlinear Systems Theory, Feminism, and Postprocessualism

“…In some cases small archaeological samples provide insufficient data to test computer-generated nonlinear models (e.g., [60,61]: 212). More fundamentally, nonlinear mathematical equations model processes in general and do not capture much of the actual complexity of past cultures [57].…”