I guess the folks at Ubisoft didn’t get the memo that only dudes hunted mammoths.
(Maybe because it’s not true. It may be that no one did. But a video game about people looting already dead mammoths probably wouldn’t sell many copies.)
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Well hey, look how well that turned out for Roosh! =P
“But a video game about people looting already dead mammoths probably wouldn’t sell many copies.”
“We gathered the mammoth!!” — No, you’re right, it doesn’t have quite the same ring.
“WHTM tracks and mocks the New Misogyny online. Also, news about mammoths.”
@katz
Oh yeah, I get that. And there are plenty I really enjoy like YMS, AVGN, Nostalgia Critic, Nostalgia Chick and Honest Trailers. It’s just I find Yahtzee very disingenuous with his criticism and way too quick to dismiss a game for inane flaws. It’s the same criticism I have for The Spoony One or the Irate Gamer and pretty much any gaming channel that resembles this:
Argenti, as one of you all’s resident biologists, I have to say you didn’t do a half bad job!
Humanity is pretty well known (in the biology field) for messing up population dynamics without even really trying…
One of my favorite science-y publications (Science, published by AAAS) has published numerous articles on mammoth extinction, because we find it pretty fascinating. Some of the schools of thought:
1) Global warming cycles changed habitat, dooming mammoths
2) The extinction of mammoths caused global warming! (No, really!) How they went extinct… maybe people?
3) Domesticating dogs helped us murder all the mammoths!
4) We didn’t hunt them, we just burned down all their food while trying to hunt other critters, thus driving them to extinction.
5) We just flat out hunted the mammoth (also called the Overkill hypothesis).
6) Um… maybe all the reasons?
@SFHC
The problem is that the mammoths had survived previous climate changes just as bad without going extinct. If anything the lose of the Mammoth steppe is believed to be caused by the lack of not mammoths to fertilize it.
Plus it wasn’t just the mammoths: the giant marsupials, reptiles and ground birds of Australia died out 50k years ago, at exactly the same time humans arrived and when the climate wasn’t changing. Then the mammoths and whooly rhinos and cave bears/lions/hyena and neanderthals in europe and northern asia, again at the same time humans show up. Then the big Mammoths, saber toothed cats, giant sloths, bear sized beavers, birds of prey with 14 foot wingsans etc in the Americas 10k years ago, the elephant birds and gorilla sized lemurs of Madagascar 2k years ago and Moas and giant eagles of New Zealand 1000 years ago. Every time humans arrived in a new environment all the local big animals suddenly died out, and these extinction events only happened when humans showed up.
On the topic a little ways up, it’s better to like something problematic. When you can recognize why it’s so problematic, it’s easier to separate that from the show.
@SFHC I think they’re desperate to find a way to make money.
That period’s place was the opposite of well chosen.
This looks good, just as long as the protagonist isn’t white, like the upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn (At least the protagonist is a woman, but she’s a white woman with a tribe and her outfit appropriates heavily from Native American garb).
Skybison, just because they went extinct when we showed up doesn’t mean they went extinct because we hunted them. We certainly could have had a role, but we definitely can drive things to extinction by other methods!
For instance, we’ve only really found evidence that humans hunted the mammoths and mastadons (of North American megafauna in particular). Also, Africa still has megafauna, despite humans being around there the absolute longest!
Okay, yeah, we’re currently wiping out rhinos and elephants (because we’re jerks), but they survived the last few thousands of years…
I’m inclined to believe the extinction was caused by multiple anthropogenic factors: some hunting combined with habitat modifications. I also totally believe that a warm spell would have put stress on the populations, so that would still be a factor.
It’s possible that mammoths could have survived with just one of the stressors (humans or a warm spell) but as soon as the two happened concurrently, bad things happened.
@ skybison
That’s also my theory about Mrs Marple.
It turned out quite badly for The Escapist, it seems. Zen of Design has some things on their bad fortunes:
http://www.zenofdesign.com/whats-going-on-with-the-escapist/
Oh yes! The Escapist is desperate.
@contrapangloss
Oh I agree, hunting probably was just part of it, and not necessarily even the biggest part, I’m just saying the pattern repeats too many times for humans not to be the main cause of the extinctions. African megafauna probably survived because they evolved alongside humans and had time to adjust, the Moas, Mastodons and giant carnivorous Kangaroos meanwhile had never met anything like us before.
One of the things I love about this place: all the peoples to geek out with.
I would have to guess that a large mammal like a mammoth wouldn’t be able to breed very prolifically. So if there are habitat changes or climate changes having a negative impact on the population, replenishing would be more difficult. Is that correct? Is anything known about the mating and gestation of mammoths? I’m just making guesses based on the fact that currently living large species tend not to be reproductively prolific.
Well we don’t know about gestation, however we do know that weaning likely occurred at 5-6 years of age for baby mammoths! Guestimate made by seeing isotope changes in bone deposits from diet changes.
Citation for all you science folks!
Rountrey, A., D. Fisher, S. Vartanyan, D. Fox, 2006. Carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of a juvenile woolly mammoth tusk: evidence of weaning. World of Elephants 2 – Selected papers from the 2nd Congress, Mammoth Site of Hot Springs. Quaternary International 169-170. pp.166-173.
It’s notable that most of our remaining megafauna is in africa, where it got to evolve concurrently with early human development, while everywhere else had mass extinctions when later humans showed up with relatively sophisticated stone tools and weapons in quantity.
Driving herds of herbivores off cliffs is a known hunting method in the American Midwest and a reasonable candidate for going after adult mammoths. It’s also possible no one ever did figure out a way to hunt healthy adult mammoths and we took a cue from our fellow predators and went after the young and weak while the herd was distracted at a watering hole.
David Futrelle,
Off course your typical MRA wouldn’t have what it would take to actually hunt a mammoth. They would just making a tasty meal for a Saber Toothed Tiger!
I played boom beach for about 10 minutes, long enough to figure out that I suck at it.
I switched to paradise bay, and I am really good at it. I mean, if I got paid for it, I would be RICH!! But then I think that maybe a barely intelligent monkey could actually be that good, too, and then I am not as impressed with myself.
That is the total extent of my game knowledge. I try, but so much of it seems so complex. You guys sound so smart when discussing it, and all I can do is nod.
Contrapangloss — cool, my fishy knowledge applies! And my autocorrect has FINALLY learned your nym 🙂
That is really nifty about the weaning time of mammoths, any idea if they (or elephants as an analogy?) are capable of having another kid while lactating? It’s a reasonable good method of family planning for humans, but our ovulation cycle is weird to start with so I have no idea in other mammals. Cuz if they’re like elephants that’d be one offspring every five years yeah? Damned easy to wipe that out if we hunted the (easier to kill) young.
@sfhc
(… Am I the only one who finds it fucking hilarious that, for all the MRAs’ screams of FEMINAZIS CAN’T BRAIN, we have everything from lawyers to marine biologists to psychologists to palaeontologists here?)
sure, but I guess I would say I expected that more than anything. For what it’s worth, my experience in an anthropology/archaeology program was that there were actually more women than men, which I found to be a pretty great thing as a man (and no, not just in that way 😛 ). Unfortunately, a small number of the men I found myself working with in labs and in the field probably identified with some of these MRA chucklefucks…aaaannnd one of them in particular didn’t believe in human evolution, climate change, or the moon landing. Now THAT is hilarious! 🙂
(yea, a graduate student anthropologist who didn’t believe in human evolution, try wrapping your mind around that one. We’ve got a brilliant thinker there, let me tell you)
@W:
I once spent some time with a young lady who, despite doing her PhD in biology at the time, didn’t believe humans evolved from monocellular life. When I asked her about it, she demurred and said that “oh, we have no idea where we came from, just theories.”
When people say this it’s usually because they’re coy about their real beliefs, so I didn’t press the matter. I have no idea whether she was a nihilist, a fundamentalist, a believer in panspermia, or something still weirder.
http://www.reactionface.info/sites/default/files/imagecache/Node_Page/images/1351711742693.gif