11.6. Who the Olduvians hunted Around residential areas in Olduvai, fossilized remains of giraffes, various antelopes and a tooth of Deinotherium, an extinct elephant, were found. The Olduvians ate plentifully and may have preferred to dine outside rather than in a shelter that had nowhere to go.

The life of an ancient man was very difficult and dangerous. Primitive tools, the constant struggle for survival in the world of predators, and even ignorance of the laws of nature, the inability to explain natural phenomena - all this made their existence difficult, full of fear.

First of all, a person needed to survive, and, therefore, to get his own food. They hunted mainly large animals, most often mammoths. How did ancient people hunt with simple tools?

How the hunt went:

• Ancient people hunted only together, in large groups.
• At first, they prepared the so-called trap pits, on the bottom of which stakes and poles were placed so that the beast that had fallen there could not get out, and people could finish it off to the end. People have studied well the habits of mammoths, which, by approximately the same road, went to a watering place to a river or lake. Therefore, pits were dug in the places of movement of mammoths.
• Having found the beast, people screamed and drove it from all sides into this hole, once in which the beast could no longer escape.
• The captured animal became food for a group of people for a long time, a means of survival in these terrible conditions.

Presenting a picture of how primitive people hunted, one can understand how dangerous hunting was for them, many died in a fight with animals. After all, the animals were huge, strong. So, a mammoth could only kill a man with a blow of his trunk, trample him with massive legs, if he catches up. Therefore, one should only be surprised: how they hunted mammoths, having only pointed sticks and stones in their hands.

Hunting is the main way of obtaining food, which for hundreds of thousands of years ensured the very existence of mankind. This is very surprising: after all, from the point of view of zoologists, neither man nor his closest "relatives" - great apes - are predators at all. According to the structure of the teeth, we are omnivores - creatures that can eat both plant and meat food. And yet it was man who became the most dangerous, most bloodthirsty predator of all that ever inhabited our planet. The most powerful, and the most cunning, and the most swift-footed animals were powerless to resist before him. As a result, hundreds of animal species were completely exterminated by man during his history, dozens of them are now on the verge of extinction.

Paleolithic man - a contemporary of the mammoth - hunted this beast not so often. In any case, much less often than it recently seemed to both scientists and those who judged the Stone Age only by fiction. But still, it is difficult to doubt that it was the specialized hunting for mammoths that was the main source of subsistence for the population of the Dnieper-Don historical and cultural region, whose whole life was closely connected with the mammoth. This is what most researchers think today. However, not all.

For example, the Bryansk archaeologist A. A. Chubur is convinced that at all times a person was able to develop only natural “mammoth cemeteries”. In other words, our mammoth hunters were really only very active bone collectors and, apparently... corpse-eaters. This very original concept seems to me completely unconvincing.

In fact, let's try to imagine: what kind of "natural processes" could cause such a massive and regular death of mammoths? A. A. Chubur has to draw absolutely incredible pictures of the constant flooding of the high right bank of the ancient Don. These floods seemed to carry the corpses of mammoths far into the depths of the ancient beams, and even there, after the decline in water, they were mastered by the local population ... At the same time, for some reason, the mammoths stubbornly did not want to migrate to high areas and escape from mass death!

The places of human settlements were somehow bypassed by those fantastic floods. Archaeologists did not find the slightest trace of such natural disasters there! This fact alone is already capable of undermining the credibility of the hypothesis of A. A. Chubur.

By the way, there really are “mammoth cemeteries” in Eastern Europe. However, it is in the vicinity of settlements with houses made of mammoth bones that they are completely absent. And yes, they are very rare indeed.

Meanwhile, think about it: in the vast territory of the center of the Russian Plain, the population was able to completely connect their lives with the extraction of mammoths. On this basis, people created a very peculiar and developed culture that functioned successfully for ten thousand years. Well, all this time they were engaged exclusively in the development of clusters of corpses?

Real "mammoth cemeteries" were indeed visited by the man of the Upper Paleolithic era and to some extent mastered by him. But none of them look like long-term camps with dwellings made of mammoth bones! And their age, as a rule, is younger: about 13-12 thousand years ago (Berelekh in Northern Asia, Sevskoe in Eastern Europe, etc.). Perhaps, on the contrary: a person increased attention to such places just when the herds of living mammoths were noticeably reduced?

Apparently, so it was! There is no reason to deny that the people who lived in the basins of the Dnieper, Don, Desna and Oka 23-14 thousand years ago were mammoth hunters. Of course, they did not refuse, on occasion, to pick up valuable tusks and bones of animals that died of natural causes. But such “gathering” simply could not be their main occupation, because finds of this kind always carry an element of chance. Meanwhile, in order to survive in the periglacial zone, a person needed not a sporadic, but a regular supply of such vital products as mammoth meat, skins, bones, wool and fat. And, judging by the archaeological materials that we have, people really managed to ensure this regularity for many millennia. But how did they learn to defeat such a powerful and intelligent beast? .. In order to answer this difficult question, let's get acquainted with the weapons of the people of the Upper Paleolithic era.

Spear thrower

The mass development of new material (bone, tusk, horn) contributed to the development and improvement of hunting weapons. But the main thing was still not this, but the technical inventions of that time. They dramatically increased both the force of impact and the distance at which the hunter could hit the game. The first most important invention of the Paleolithic man along this path was the spear thrower.

What was it? - It seems to be nothing special: a simple stick or a bone rod with a hook at the end. However, a hook pressed against the blunt end of the shaft of a spear or dart, when thrown, gives it an additional push. As a result, the weapon flies farther and hits the target much harder than if it were just thrown by hand. Spear throwers are well known from ethnographic materials. They were widespread among a wide variety of peoples: from the Aborigines of Australia to the Eskimos. But when did they first appear and to what extent were they used by the Upper Paleolithic population?

It is difficult to answer this question with complete certainty. The oldest bone spear throwers that have come down to us were found in France in the monuments of the so-called Madeleine culture (Late Paleolithic). These finds are genuine works of art. They are decorated with sculptural images of animals and birds and, perhaps, were not ordinary, but ritual, "ceremonial" weapons.

At the sites of Eastern European mammoth hunters, such objects made of bone have not yet been found. But this does not mean that mammoth hunters did not know spear throwers at all. Most likely, here they were simply made of wood. Perhaps it is worth taking a closer look at the objects that have so far been described by archaeologists as "bone and tusk rods." Among them, there may well be fragments of spear throwers, albeit not as beautiful as those found in France.

Bow and arrows

This is the most formidable weapon of all created by primitive man. Until recently, scientists believed that it appeared relatively late: about 10 thousand years ago. But now many archaeologists are confident that in reality the bow began to be used much earlier. Miniature flint arrowheads have now been found in settlements where people lived 15, 22, and even 30 thousand years ago!

True, during the entire Upper Paleolithic, these finds did not become massive. A little later, in the Neolithic, they are found everywhere and in very large numbers. Paleolithic arrowheads are characteristic only of individual cultures, and there are relatively few of them. This suggests that for at least twenty thousand years the use of bows and arrows was very limited, despite the clear merits of these weapons (see Chap. "Conflicts and Wars").

A quite natural question arises: why did this happen? Why did the bow not immediately spread everywhere, displacing the same spear thrower? Well, there is an explanation for this. Any invention, even the most perfect, is introduced into life and begins to improve only when it is really necessary for its era, its culture. After all, the principle of the steam engine was first discovered and applied not by Watt or even Polzunov, but by Heron of Alexandria. It happened in the 1st century BC, long before both England and Russia appeared on the world map. But then, in a slave society, such an invention could only be used as a fun toy.

In driven hunting, which fully provided a person with the necessary prey, the bow, of course, was not completely useless, but did not play a decisive role. In general, the importance of the bow as a hunting weapon is greatly exaggerated in our literature. The same ethnographic observations show that highly developed hunter-gatherer tribes successfully obtained the required amount of game for themselves, mainly by "beamless" methods. For example, the peoples of the taiga zone of Siberia and the Far North-East, as a rule, knew the bow, but did not differ in the art of shooting. Reindeer were hunted there with spears, and sea animals were hunted with swivel harpoons and nets.

Apparently, already in the Mesolithic-Neolithic, the bow was not so much a hunting weapon as a military weapon. And it was in this capacity that he was truly indispensable. Further improvement of the bow and the development of shooting techniques are associated primarily with the increased frequency of clashes between human groups.

Spears and darts

This weapon, which appeared at the dawn of human development, becomes much more diverse and perfect in the Upper Paleolithic. In the previous Mustye (Middle Paleolithic) era, mainly heavy horned spears were used. Now, however, various types of tools of this kind are in use. Among them were massive, designed for close combat. They could be made both in the old "Acheulian" way (when the pointed end of a wooden spear was simply burned on fire), and in a new way - from whole pieces of a dissected and straightened mammoth tusk. At the same time, short light darts were used, which were sometimes also made entirely of tusks. Similar tools have been found in many places, including the settlements of mammoth hunters.

The shapes and sizes of dart tips were very diverse. From the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, flint tips were supplemented with bone or tusk ones, which significantly improved the quality of throwing weapons. In the future, insert tips appear, - approximately in the middle of the Upper Paleolithic era, 23-22 thousand years ago (see Ch. "Tools").

Of course, mammoth hunters also used the oldest human weapon: clubs. The latter were heavy, "melee", and light, throwing. One of the options for such weapons was the famous boomerangs. In any case, in the Upper Paleolithic site of Mamutova Cave (Poland), an object was found that was similar in appearance to Australian heavy boomerangs, but made from mammoth tusk. By the way, it is worth noting that the Australians themselves use heavy (non-returning) boomerangs for serious purposes. Glorified throughout the world, returning boomerangs serve them only for games or for hunting birds.

Were there pit traps in the Paleolithic?

But how did people hunt mammoths with such weapons? To begin with, let us recall again the panel by V. M. Vasnetsov “The Stone Age”, which adorns the first hall of the Moscow Historical Museum.

“... An angry poor mammoth is raging in a trap pit, and a crowd of half-naked savages, men and women, finishes him off with whatever they have to: with cobblestones, spears, arrows ...” Yes, hunting for mammoths was imagined for a long time! Similar ideas are reflected in school textbooks, and in popular books, and in M. Pokrovsky's story "Mammoth Hunters". That's just ... it was hardly the case in reality.

Think for yourself: how could people who had only wooden or bone shovels at their disposal build a trapping pit for a mammoth with them? Yes, of course, they knew how to dig small dugouts and storage pits up to a meter deep. But the trap for such an animal as a mammoth must be huge! Is it easy to dig such a hole, and not even in soft soil, but in permafrost? The efforts expended at the same time clearly did not correspond to the results: after all, only one animal could fall into the pit, at best! So wouldn't it have been easier to get it some other way? Like... with a spear?

Can you kill an elephant with a spear?

The experience of the modern backward peoples of Africa shows that it is quite possible to kill an elephant using only a spear as a weapon. For example, the Pygmies have achieved such great skill in this that two or three people coped with such a task with relative ease. It is known that in the life of the elephant herd the leader enjoys exceptionally high authority. It is his behavior that determines the safety of the entire group. Usually a herd of elephants graze for a long time in the same area. Individual animals, especially young ones, tend to fight off the group, get out from under the protection of the leader.

African hunters have long known that, having a delicate sense of smell, elephants see very poorly. Given this, the pygmies with the greatest caution sneaked up on such a lone beast. For camouflage, not only the direction of the wind was used, but also the elephant droppings with which they were smeared. One of the hunters got close to the elephant, sometimes even under the belly, and delivered a fatal blow with a spear.

The pygmies of the 19th-20th centuries AD already had spears with iron tips. With them, they most often cut the tendons of the hind legs of the elephant. Our distant ancestor, a Paleolithic hunter, armed only with a wooden horn spear, most likely beat the mammoth obliquely into the groin area with it. When fleeing, the animal, distraught with pain, touched the ground with the shaft, the bushes. As a result, the weapon was driven inside, breaking large blood vessels... The hunters pursued the wounded beast to death. Among the Pygmies, such a pursuit of an elephant could last 2-3 days.

We note right away: where mammoth bones were used as building material, they are found in great numbers, hundreds and thousands. Analyzes and calculations of these bones, carried out by paleozoologists, show that in all cases their collection gives a picture of a “normal herd”. In other words, the settlements contain in certain proportions the bones of females and males, and old individuals, and mature ones, and young animals, and cubs, and even the bones of unborn, uterine mammoths. All this is possible only in one case: mammoth hunters, as a rule, did not exterminate individual animals, but a whole herd, or at least a significant part of it! And this assumption is quite consistent with what archaeologists know about the method of hunting, the most common in the Upper Paleolithic.

driven hunting

In the Upper Paleolithic era, the collective corral was the main way of hunting large game. Some places of such mass slaughters are well known to archaeologists. For example, in France, near the town of Solutre, there is a rock under which the bones of tens of thousands of horses that fell off a steep cliff were found. Probably, in the period about 17 thousand years ago, more than one herd died here, directed to the abyss by Solutrean hunters... An ancient ravine was excavated near the city of Amvrosievka in South-Eastern Ukraine. It turned out that many thousands of bison found their death at the bottom of it ... Apparently, people hunted mammoths in a similar way - where this hunt was their main occupation. True, we do not yet know of clusters of mammoth bones like Solutra and Amvrosievka. Well, hopefully there will be more places like this in the future.

It is worth noting one of the most characteristic features of hunting in the Paleolithic - the preference given to some particular type of prey. In the region of interest to us, this preference was given to the mammoth, a little to the south - to the bison, and in the south-west of Eastern Europe - to the reindeer. True, the predominant object of hunting has never been the only one. For example, Western European hunters of horses and reindeer happened to kill mammoths as well. Siberian and North American buffalo hunters did the same. Yes, and mammoth hunters, on occasion, did not refuse to pursue deer or horses. Driven hunting in the Paleolithic was not the only way to get the beast. It had a distinct seasonal character. "Large pens" such as those described above were undertaken no more than 1-2 times a year (ethnographic analogies also confirm this well: primitive hunters knew how to protect nature much better than modern humanity!). The rest of the time, people, as a rule, got their own food, hunting either in small groups or alone.

hunting dogs

With these methods of "lonely" hunting, obviously, one of the remarkable achievements of mankind was connected: the domestication of the dog. The oldest dog bones in the world, very similar to wolf bones, but still different from them, were discovered at the Eliseevichi 1 site in the Dnieper region and date back about 14 thousand years ago. Thus, this most important moment of the Upper Paleolithic era is directly related to the area occupied at that time by East European mammoth hunters ... Of course, then the dog was not yet ubiquitous. And, probably, a sudden meeting with the first domestic animal made an indelible impression on those who had hitherto known only wild animals.

Fishing

A few words should be said about fishing in the Paleolithic. No remnants of fishing gear - hooks, sinkers, remnants of nets or tops, etc. - not found in the parking lots of that time. Specialized fishing tools most likely appeared later. But fish bones are also found in the settlements of mammoth hunters, although quite rarely. I have already mentioned a necklace of fish vertebrae found in the upper cultural layer of the Kostenki 1 site. Probably, in those days, large fish were hunted with a dart - like any other game. Only for this case special skill was required.

Hunting rules

And, finally, another important point worth mentioning is the attitude of the Paleolithic man to the world around him, to the same game. Let me remind you that the culture of mammoth hunters existed for at least 10 thousand years. This is an incredibly long period, probably even difficult to imagine from the point of view of our contemporary. After all, “civilized humanity” had a much shorter period of time to put the whole world on the brink of an ecological catastrophe. But in the Paleolithic era, the population of the Russian Plain for many millennia managed, ultimately, to properly regulate the ecological balance, to prevent the extinction of animal species on which its own existence depended.

Hunting as a feat

Hunting for a large animal, as a rule, was of a commercial nature. But, apparently, killing a dangerous predator was seen as a feat, as a sure path to glory. The famous burials of two teenagers found in Sungir contain the most interesting finds - pendants from the claws of a tigrolv - a powerful beast that really combined the signs of a lion and a tiger (for a long time this beast was called the "cave lion", but now this term has almost fallen into disuse). One of the buried had two such pendants, the other had one. Undoubtedly, the possession of such things had a deep symbolic meaning. Perhaps it was a reward for a perfect feat? ..

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Introduction

History is my favorite subject at school. Back in the fifth grade, studying the "History of the Ancient World", the lessons of history became a real discovery for me - the facts from the life of people of this period amazed me! I was especially impressed by the most ancient people who, living in such harsh conditions, having a minimum number of any adaptations for life, learned the world, made discoveries, developed!

The more I learned about the ancient period of mankind, the more questions I had. Particular interest arose in the study of human life during the Ice Age. Listening to the teacher’s story about how ancient people hunted mammoths, I had a question: “Could people of the Ice Age really hunt mammoths?” After all, the mammoth is a huge and strong animal, its body is protected by a thick layer of fat and thick wool. Could the weapons of ancient man hit this giant. And I also thought that in the conditions of the ice age, digging a huge trap for a mammoth is almost impossible.

I decided to find out what real scientists think about this. And my history teacher, Tatyana Vladimirovna Kurochkina, suggested doing a whole study.

Target - the solution of the historical problem - "hunting for mammoths: truth or fiction?"

An object- the life of the most ancient people in the ice age.

Thing - mammoth hunting.

Hypothesis - ancient people rarely or did not hunt mammoths at all.

Tasks:

To get acquainted with the origin of mammoths, their structure, peculiarities of living.

Analyze various literature on this issue (educational, encyclopedias, Internet information).

To study information about the data of archaeological excavations of the sites of ancient people.

Research methods:

In the course of the work, search, research, analytical, comparative research methods were used.

The history of antiquity keeps many mysteries that mankind has yet to unravel. For many decades, people believed that the earliest people hunted mammoths, which is why they died out. But whether this was actually the case remains to be seen.

Chapter 1. Mammoth - "prehistoric giant"

Among the animals that have disappeared before the eyes of man, the mammoth occupies a special place.

According to scientists, mammoths appeared in the period about 5 - 1.5 million years ago and lived on a vast territory: Europe, Asia, Africa and North America [App. one]. It is believed that the very first mammoths lived in Africa 5 million years ago. Over the next three million years, they spread to all continents of the Earth.

The time of extinction of these animals is not exactly known. The generally accepted date of extinction of this genus is the period of 10-12 thousand years ago. Although there are other data. For example, some scientists believe that the woolly mammoth (one of the species) died out about 4-6 thousand years ago.

Most mammoths lived in a historical period that began almost 3 million years ago, and scientists call it the "Quaternary period" - which means the modern stage of the history of the Earth. It was in it that many important events in the history of the Earth took place, the most important of which are the Ice Age and the emergence of man [App. 2].

Mammoths were perfectly adapted to life in the harsh conditions of a cold climate. Mammoths roamed in small herds, adhering to river valleys and feeding on grass, branches of trees and shrubs. Such herds were very mobile - it was not easy to collect the required amount of food in the tundra steppe.

The size of the mammoths was quite impressive: an adult male of the largest steppe mammoth reached 4.5 m at the withers, weighed up to 18 tons and had tusks with a total length of up to 5 m. Large male woolly mammoths could reach a height of 3.5 meters, and their tusks were up to 4 meters long and weighed about 100 kilograms. And dwarf species of mammoths did not exceed 2 meters in height and weighed up to 900 kg. Average life expectancy was 45-50, maximum 80 years.

One of the most common types of mammoths was the woolly mammoth, which lived in the northern latitudes and on the territory of modern Siberia [App. 3]. The body was covered with thick, long hair. In winter, its length on the back and sides reached 90 centimeters, and a thick undercoat formed under the main hairline. In the warm season, most of the wool was wiped off, becoming shorter and lighter. The fat layer, which was almost ten centimeters, served as additional protection from the cold. Wool, which is found during excavations, is predominantly red or yellowish in color. However, scientists are sure that the light shade is the result of the influence of climate, but in reality, large herbivores were black and dark brown.

The woolly mammoth had small, tightly pressed ears to the skull, which made its head somewhat out of proportion. In addition to the shape of the ears, ancient animals were distinguished by the trunk, which was used to collect grass and leaves. The trunk at the end had a transverse extension, which, presumably, served to rake snow, prevent frostbite of the trunk, and also to use snow to quench thirst. The tip of the trunk of mammoths was hairless, which indicates its use in the extraction of food.

Mammoths did not use the trunk as a means of protection. But an excellent means of defense were tusks, the length of which reached 4.5 meters. It is noteworthy that the mammoth tusk was an invariable attribute of both males and females.

Also, with the help of tusks, the animals dug out food from under the snow, tore off the bark of trees, mined vein ice, which was used instead of water in winter. For grinding food, the mammoth had only one very large tooth on each side of the upper and lower jaws at the same time. The chewing surface of these teeth was a wide, long plate covered with transverse enamel ridges. Apparently, in the warm season, the animals fed mainly on grassy vegetation. Grasses and sedges prevailed in the intestines and oral cavity of mammoths that died in the summer, lingonberry bushes, green mosses and thin shoots of willow, birch, and alder were found in small quantities. The weight of an adult mammoth's stomach filled with food could reach 240 kg. In winter, especially in snowy seasons, the shoots of trees and shrubs acquired the main importance in the nutrition of animals. The huge amount of food consumed forced the mammoths to lead a mobile lifestyle and often change their feeding areas.

It is believed that these animals led a predominantly herd lifestyle. Eight to ten adults with cubs gathered in a group, the oldest and most experienced female (matriarchy) became the leader. When the males were 8-10 years old (reached maturity), they were expelled from the maternal herd and began to lead a solitary lifestyle.

Perhaps this way of life of mammoths influenced the very name of this species. The Russian word "mammoth" is close to the Christian name Mamant, which in Greek means "maternal", "sucking the mother's breast", later "mamma" - "mother".

Chapter 2

For many years, it was believed that the main reason for the extinction of mammoths was hunting for them by primitive people. And there was no doubt that the most ancient man hunted the mammoth. But recently there are more and more supporters of a different point of view - mammoths died out due to a sharp warming of the climate, and hunting for mammoths was rare and was considered a great success for people. To understand this and confirm or refute our hypothesis, it is necessary to analyze the views of historians.

First of all, we decided to analyze the educational literature for fifth grade students. The necessary material of five textbooks on the history of the Ancient World by different authors, which are used by modern children, was studied.

All textbooks contain very brief information about the hunt of ancient people for mammoths. And only in one the author describes in detail and vividly a fragment of the hunt for a mammoth.

“The men are going on a big hunt: they tie stone tips to wooden spears more firmly, they grind torches; two old men are hammering stone blanks, making spare spears for everyone. One of the men recounts how a herd of mammoths crossed the river last night and ended up in the hunting grounds of their community. Everyone has smiles on their faces - the hungry days are over ... by evening, the united herd of hunters took a herd of mammoths into a half ring, leaving only the path to the river cliff free ... ".

The next step was the analysis of Children's encyclopedias on history. The Avanta+ encyclopedia World History, written by professional historians, states that during the Ice Age, mammoths and other large animals were constantly on the move in search of food. They were followed by communities of families who hunted them, as meat, skin and tusks were necessary for them to survive in harsh conditions.

The Big Encyclopedia of a preschooler from the Olma-press publishing house has a section titled “Hunters of the Ice Age”, which says that during the Ice Age, ancient people hunted such animals as woolly rhinoceros, saber-toothed tiger, mammoth, from whose bones and skins people built and insulated their dwellings.

The electronic children's encyclopedia "Man - origin and device" contains the following information: primitive people hunted herbivores: mammoths, bison, deer, horses. Since these animals often migrated in search of food or fleeing the cold, people had to follow them so as not to be left without food.

In the Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Big Russian Encyclopedia publishing house, the article "Mammoth" states that this animal species has become extinct as a result of climate change and human extermination.

The Reader's Digest World History Atlas also says that Ice Age man hunted mammoths. Since he lived in the habitats of these animals.

The Internet contains a large number of articles on mammoths. The analysis of these articles showed that there is no single approach to the consecration of the problem of people hunting for mammoths.

In the article "Hunting for mammoths: heroism, legend or massacre?" journalist Alexander Babintsev claims that mammoth hunting was a very dangerous and difficult business: “In addition to the fact that it was necessary to drive the mammoth, it was also necessary to kill it. In itself, the task of killing an animal, whose average height was four meters, weight about eight tons, and tusks reached several meters in length, is a difficult task. Especially if you remember that a person of that time had no other tool than spears and arrows with stone tips, which were not easy to get to the skin of a mammoth, since the length of its coarse wool was half a meter, often more. Therefore, it is unlikely that in primitive times there could be tribes of people who specialized in hunting mammoths. Most likely, these were isolated cases that occurred during those periods when the seasonal migration routes of mammoths passed near human habitats.

The author of the article assumes that hunting for mammoths was a process extended over time. So, several hunters got as close as possible to the animals and, throwing spears from a distance, inflicted several wounds on the mammoth. Then, for several days, people followed the herd of mammoths, waiting for the moment when the animal, weakened by the loss of blood, would lag behind its relatives. And then already the mammoth achieved from a closer distance.

In the article “Primitive hunting”, the author believes that the ancient man, a contemporary of the mammoth, did not hunt him very often. The author argues that for people who lived 23-14 thousand years ago, it was the specialized hunting for mammoths that was the main source of subsistence.

The author also claims that people did not use pit traps when hunting mammoths: “could people, who had only wooden or bone shovels at their disposal, build a trapping pit for a mammoth with them? Yes, of course, they knew how to dig small dugouts and storage pits up to a meter deep. But the trap for such an animal as a mammoth must be huge! Is it easy to dig such a hole, and not even in soft soil, but in permafrost? The efforts expended at the same time clearly did not correspond to the results: after all, only one animal could fall into the pit, at best. According to the author, the collective corral was the main way of hunting large game.

The author of the article “Secrets of hunting for mammoths” believes that hunting for ancient people was something like a military operation that had to be carefully prepared. It was necessary, for example, to find a place in the forest or steppe where it would be possible to strike at the enemy with the least losses for themselves. The steep banks of the rivers were such places. Here the earth suddenly left from under the feet of the intended victim. People could hide near the watering place and, having jumped out of the ambush, finish off the gaping animals. Or wait near the ford. Here, stretching out in a chain, the animals one by one, carefully probing the bottom, move to the other side. Move slowly, cautiously. At these moments they are very vulnerable, which was well known to the ancient hunters, who collected their bloody catch.

So, most authors of Internet articles are inclined to believe that the ancient man hunted the mammoth, but hunting was a rare and dangerous phenomenon. In addition, she wore a specialized - corral character. Some authors argue that the question of hunting mammoths remains open, since ancient man, for example, never depicted scenes of hunting mammoths, and there is no direct evidence of hunting for these large animals.

Chapter 3

Archeology is a science assistant to history. Archaeological excavations have helped scientists make great historical discoveries. Perhaps the analysis of archaeological data will also help us answer the question - hunting for mammoths: truth or fiction?

On the Internet, I found a lot of information that archaeologists at different times, at different sites of ancient people, found bones and tusks of mammoths in large quantities, which were used in human life: “Our distant ancestors destroyed mammoths in such quantities that they could from their tusks and skulls to build their own dwellings, each of which took several dozen individuals.

For example, mammoth bones found during excavations of a Paleolithic dwelling in Gontsy in Ukraine were not scattered in disorder, but were arranged in a certain form in the form of an oval 4.5 m long and about 4 m wide, bordered by 27 mammoth skulls. In addition, 30 mammoth blades were dug vertically along the edge of this oval platform, 30 mammoth tusks lay in the middle. The skulls and shoulder blades of the mammoth were the base of the walls of the ancient dwelling, the tusks, most likely, served as the structural basis of its low domed roof.

During the excavations of the Yurovitskaya site in the Kalinkovichi region, the remains of 15-20 mammoths, mostly young, as well as a primitive bull, a wild horse, an arctic fox, and 60 processed flints were found. Coal stains, a certain system in the placement of stones and large mammoth bones indicate that there was a dwelling of ancient people.

In the village of Kostenki, on the Don, not far from Voronezh, numerous sites were discovered, which were famous for a large number of fossil bones of animals, including mammoths. The remains of mammoths were found in more than 200 places on the territory of modern Belarus. In most cases, they were located near the banks of large rivers.

Scientists, analyzing the ancient settlements, came to the conclusion that in search of prey, the ancient people inhabiting these places carried out long journeys, made raids with subsequent pursuit. They drove animals into deep ravines, to cliffs or into swamps, made ambushes along the paths that led to watering places, and also dug deep holes. As a rule, parking lots were built near such places.

But still, there was no convincing evidence that people hunted mammoths until recently, since the presence of a large number of mammoth bones in paleohuman sites does not yet indicate that this is precisely the result of hunting them. They could also accumulate for a variety of reasons not related to hunting. Indirectly, this may be evidenced by the fact that at some sites numerous bones were found, whose age significantly exceeds the age of the sites themselves.

All this could mean that the bones accumulated here naturally, or people simply picked up the bones of long-dead animals for their needs. On the other hand, until now there have been almost no finds of tools or their fragments stuck in the bones of prey - direct traces of hunting.

The first important discovery was made in the early 1990s at the famous Kostenki site. A rib was found there, in which the tip of a throwing weapon was stuck. However, this fact was not properly and timely made public, and almost no one knew anything about it, and almost no one returned to it. Then, already in 2002, in Western Siberia (in the Khanty-Mansiysk district, on the Ob) a mammoth vertebra about 13 thousand years old was found, in which the tip of the tool was also stuck.

But all these, of course, were isolated finds that did not constitute conclusive evidence.

But in 2001, geologist Mikhail Dashtserene discovered the northernmost human site - Yanskaya (near the mouth of the Yana River). Later, a group of archaeologists explored the site and found amazing finds here.

A stuck tip was found in one mammoth shoulder blade. A fragment of another shoulder blade contained two split pieces of the tip and a piece of shaft (a piece of tusk was stuck between the stones). Finally, a hole left by the tip of a throwing weapon was found in the third blade [App. 6].

Finds at the Yanskaya site of ancient people in Siberia materially confirmed that people of the Stone Age still hunted the mammoth. According to scientists, there are no such finds anywhere in the world.

Based on these data, we can conclude that ancient people actively used bones, tusks, wool, and most likely meat for their own needs, but archaeologists rarely find direct evidence of ancient man's hunting.

Conclusion

In historical science, disputes about whether ancient people hunted mammoths have been going on for more than a hundred years. For a long time, archaeologists who found the bones and tusks of mammoths almost unconditionally recognized them as the remains of human hunting prey. However, scientists did not come across real evidence of this.

As a result of the analysis of the literature, I concluded that most authors believe that hunting for mammoths is not fiction, but reality. Hunting for mammoths and other large animals during the Ice Age was an important necessity for the people of that time, as it provided them with almost everything they needed to survive in harsh conditions. But in the analyzed literature, there is practically no description of the methods of hunting mammoths.

An analysis of Internet sources showed that there are different views on this problem, there are both opponents and supporters of the mammoth hunting theory. But still, most of the authors of articles adhere to this theory.

Data from individual archaeological excavations also testify to this.

Thus, I was not able to confirm the hypothesis that ancient people did not hunt mammoths. As it turned out, the mammoth was the object of hunting. But it was a rare or frequent occurrence - I practically did not find information about this, only one author says that hunting was rare.

While working on this study, I had even more questions: why did mammoths die out, and what role did man play in this.

My work is of practical importance, as it can be used in history lessons as an additional material. It would be interesting to meet this unusual animal today!

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Appendix 1

Mammoth habitat in Eurasia

Appendix 2

Quaternary period - the modern stage of the history of the Earth

Annex 3

woolly mammoth

Appendix 4

Mammoth hunting

Annex 5

Mammoth bones at the sites of ancient people

Appendix 6

Mammoth bones with fragments of ancient man's weapons on

Yanskoy parking