Paleo Hunting

Paleo humans stalked prey by placing their feet inside the footprints of the animal.

NPS Photo

Finding a meal today is a simple task. We can buy food from a market or a restaurant. The food comes prepared, so we have little or no effort in having a meal. In contrast to the ice age, people living then did not have the convenience of walking into a market to buy mammoth meat.

During the ice age, people spent their days hunting and gathering food. But compared to modern hunters the task of finding food could be dangerous and even deadly. The animals of the ice age were not your normal sized game we see today and some of these animals can be as tall as an adult human standing on the shoulders of another adult. The animals also had large claws and teeth meant to fight larger predators. For thousands of years, people were hunting these beasts and the only tools available were stone-tipped spears and clever brains.

Even here at White Sands, we find fossilized footprints of ice age animals on Alkali Flat. Before the dunes were formed Alkali Flat once was the bed of Lake Otero. This great body of water attracted some of the animals of the ice age and paleo-humans followed herds of these animals. Fossilized footprints of both people and animals are scattered across Alkali Flat at White Sands and we have the largest collection of human footprints from the ice age. Even more remarkable is the fact people were interacting with these large beasts.

 

Paleo humans used misdirection to hunt a giant ground sloth.

NPS Photo

One set of footprints appears to show stalking of a giant ground sloth. A person was placing their feet inside the footprints of the sloth as it moved across the ancient lake shore. The tracks of human/sloth footprints ends at a circle of sloth footprints, scientists call these flailing circles, and they suggest the sloth turned around to swing toward the human. This must have been terrifying for the human to approach a large animal that could kill you in one swipe. We also see toe prints of a human approaching these circles from the side. We don’t know why they would approach so close. Perhaps the person was attempting to make the final blow to the animal’s underside while the sloth was distracted?

Beyond this, we do not know what happened. We do not know if they were actually successful in hunting this giant beast. No bones or tools appear at the site - the environment of the lake would not preserve such items, apart from stone points. Odds are likely they did not succeed in killing the animal since two out of three hunts were unsuccessful.
This hunting scene is a small example of the human footprints we find on the old bed of Lake Otero. We find a variety in the shape and size of the human footprints, including children. This suggests that whole families may have observed or participated with hunting in some fashion.

We do not know much about the Paleo humans that once lived in the Tularosa Basin. The old lake bed of Otero still has many secrets buried under sand waiting for the wind to reveal them. One day perhaps we will know more about those who hunted the Ice Age animals of Lake Otero.

Reference
Bustos et al., Sci. Adv. 2018; 4: eaar7621 25 April 2018, Footprints preserve terminal Pleistocene hunt?: Human-sloth interactions in North America