Overkill hypothesis

This is one of my posts that has to do with something a book said, rather than the book itself. I've been reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's a good book, and I like it so far. I don't have a problem with any of his theories per se, it's just that he evidently espouses (or did at the time), several theories of anthropologists that do not, in my opinion and the opinions of many people much more knowledgeable than I, hold water. The only part of his book that I have a problem with is the idea that anything besides germs mattered. I mean, by guns and steel he's really talking about technology (Indians lacking the wheel and all). When settlers first came over, their guns were inferior to bows. The only reason they worked was that upon first seeing them, they so shocked the Indians that they ran away. As soon as they learned that guns couldn't hit accurately beyond fifty feet, they would stand one or two hundred feet away and shoot them with arrows. Steel armor was already going out of fashion by the time the Spanish came over. They abandoned it during their long campaign against the Inkas and took to wearing Inka armor. And they found guns to be just as useless as the English did at actually killing anybody (although cannons were highly effective). This is not to say that European technology did not give them an advantage, but let's not overstate the case, as Diamond has done (accidentally or not). The Spanish won not because of guns and steel, but because disease had brought about a civil war among the Inka. The Spaniards used the help of other Indian tribes that hated the Inka to overthrow them. While accounts often talk about the 168 Spaniards in Pizarro's mission being dwarfed by the tens of thousands of Inka soldiers, they conveniently forget to mention the tens of thousands of native allies who were beside them.

Also, the use of horses by the Spaniards was in general a hindrance rather than a help. They could not be used as pack animals because the terrain was too steep for them to walk and carry a load. The Andes does not, typically, have wide open spaces for cavalry charges, so they served little except to make the Spanish cavalrymen higher targets. I don't want to overstate the case. I mean, they were useful at times and the Indians did have problems resisting cavalry charges. But Diamond does overstate the case when he claims that infantry never (in any place) figured out how to stand up to cavalry. In truth, there was only a brief period after the stirrup was developed that heavy infantry was possible and infantry had no tactics to defend themselves. On the contrary, the Romans could break any cavalry thrown against them. The Japanese figured it out too. So did Medieval Europe (what do you suppose the pike was for?) The Spanish Tercios could break cavalry. The Inkas figured out that bolos at the legs of horses would take them down. They just didn't have time to develop it into a solid anti-cavalry strategy.

Again, I'm not knocking Diamond's book. His theories work whether you believe those things or not. It's just that I can't stand the idea that any humans of past times were any less intelligent than we are now. It's just not true. And while Diamond himself says this, he espouses belief in the overkill theory. If you're not familiar, this is a theory that links the disappearance of most megafauna (big mammals) in the Americas with the arrival of humans after the end of the last ice age. The argument put forth is simple: these megafauna had lasted through 22 ice ages, so the end of the last ice age cannot have been a factor. However, since humans arrived at precisely this time, the two events must be linked.

I'm not going to say that this is impossible. But this commits the logical fallacy of assuming that since two things happen at the same time, they are related. There is exactly one case where we have found mammoth bones with a human spearpoint buried in the ribs. This one piece of evidence is used to support the argument.

The problem is that even since before Diamond wrote the book, much doubt has been cast on the "Clovis barrier". According to the Clovis First camp, there was no human settlement of the Americas until the ice age ended approximately 13,000 years ago. This camp also espoused the "ice-corridor" settlement pattern, in which humans flowed down to the Americas through a corrider between the two arctic ice sheets that had sealed it off. The problem with the Clovis idea is that you have human remains in South America as long ago as you have human remains in North America. As a matter of fact, Monte Verde may be the oldest human settlement in the Americas, which wouldn't make sense. Another problem is that there is not a shred of proof that humans ever came down the ice corrider, and that the ice corridor did not exist at the correct time for the Clovis-firsters. This was found out just recently, but is not doubted. Clovis-firsters also want us to believe that people could not have used boats to settle the coasts first (which would now be the sunken coasts where recent digs have uncovered traces of very, very old human settlement), even though Australia was settled by boat nearly 40,000 years ago.

I'm not going to get into all the problems of Clovis-First though. I just want to mention it as the first big argument against the overkill theory. So supposedly, 13,000 years ago, humans came down the ice-corridor, and finding the land overflowing with large game that didn't know to run, they killed all the animals. There's three more problems with this. One, there was a large die-out of non-game animals as well, and two, some of the die-offs occurred before humans could have been in N. America. If humans came down the ice corridor, they would have been in the middle United States, not on either coast. Yet you have die-offs all over the continent. Three, there's no evidence at all that humans ate much, if any, megafauna. Most people forget that historically, women have produced the bulk of food eaten and that hunting was the occasional pastime if you could afford it (in terms of ignoring other work). Unless humans completely abandoned this practice when they got over here, why would they be eating all that meat? Sure, a meat buffet would probably be pretty enticing, but let me tell you, taking on a mammoth with nothing more than a stone tipped spear sounds more like desperately crazy to me than simply somebody who's hungry for some meat, especially when there would be plenty of small game around.

I guess there's another problem with that theory that I had forgotten until now. It's that there is still megafauna around in the Americas. Not much, and not nearly as much as what there used to be, but there is. Think about bison, llamas, jaguars, and deer. If we were so meat crazy when we came over, why did we leave any? Did we change just in time to save a few? Did we get responsible all of a sudden? Go vegetarian? What the hell's with that?

Anyway, I think I'm about done ranting on that subject. And you probably quit caring a while ago, so that's it.