Back in the mid-1990s when I first began writing about American Indians
and ecology, I was surprised to see how eager some progressives, and
even some Marxists, were to characterize the Indians as just as wasteful
as a modern corporation. Talking points included bison being driven off
cliffs, as well as the earliest ancestors of modern Indians being
responsible for killing off the wooly mammoth and a number of other
Pleistocene megafauna.
The extremely distinguished Marxist David Harvey wrote an extremely
undistinguished book called “Justice, Nature, and the Geography of
Difference” (nobody is perfect) that included these talking points,
including the following:
"Archaeological evidence likewise suggests that late ice-age hunting
groups hunted many of their prey to extinction while fire must surely
rate as one of the most far-reaching agents of ecological transformation
ever acquired, allowing very small groups to exercise immense
ecosystemic influence."
Harvey’s citation for this is a 1956 article by Carl Sauer, a geographer
who has the distinction of being the first to put forward the overkill
hypothesis but it is really Paul S. Martin who has become the most
prominent defender. Martin, a U. of Arizona geosciences professor
emeritus, began writing about Pleistocene extinctions and Clovis
people’s (a “paleo-Indian named after the archaeological site in New
Mexico where a characteristic spear point was discovered) sole
responsibility for the “blitzkrieg” in 1967.
Unfortunately, very few of Martin’s articles are available online except
for those who have access to a research library, as I do. If you want to
read a fairly typical example, I would refer you to the March 9, 1973
Science Magazine article titled “The Discovery of America” in which he
makes the case that overkill of large herbivore mammals like the mammoth
was made possible by the beast’s failure to recognize man as a predator.
Once the herbivores became extinct, it was only a matter of time before
the carnivores—including the saber-tooth tiger—became extinct as well.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/the-woolly-mammoth-and-the-noble-savage/
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