How to Hunt a Mastodon

Two Paleo-Indians with spears

Can you imagine hunting elephants with weapons like these?

Around 10,000 years ago, Paleo-Indian peoples hunted prehistoric elephants called mastodons using spears tipped with stone points.How were they able to do that?They were also armed with knowledge and cooperation.They knew a lot about their environment, including the habits of mastodons.And, since killing a mastodon required many spears, they had to assemble a group of several hunters and develop a strategy that would allow a handful of people to kill a large, powerful animal like a mastodon.

One way this probably happened was to ambush a mastodon on the shore of a pond or lake as it came to drink.At a given signal, the hunters would yell, scream, and whistle to startle the mastodon, and hopefully, cause the animal to panic and go forward into the water where its great weight would cause its feet to stick in the soft lake bottom.With the mastodon unable to flee, and hampered by the mud in turning to fight its attackers, the hunters could use their spears at close range to inflict multiple wounds.As the animal weakened, the hunters would eventually be able to cause greater blood loss, and perhaps reach vital organs with their spears.

Links:

The University of Michigan Exhibit Museum has a good description of mastodons in Michigan at http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/exhibitmuseum/exhibits/content/Mastodon/Mastodon-1.asp.

Archaeologists from Cranbrook Institute of Science have excavated the Adams Mastodon, discovered in 2006: http://science.cranbrook.edu/common/sidebar_detail.asp?textid=21678&L1=4&L2=1&L3=

An update posted after further study in the lab includes a nice diagram of the bones recovered from this mastodon: http://science.cranbrook.edu/ftpimages/185/misc/misc_47094.pdf,