SEVENTEEN

THE MAKING OF THE BUFFALO

With the end of the Clovis culture about 12,900 years ago, America's first human frontier closed. The first pan-North American culture had vanished and the varied Indian cultures to which it gave rise would live within the bounds of a diverse yet impoverished continent. Of all the great beasts that fed the Clovis people, just one was still present—the American buffalo or bison—but even it was now represented by a different genetic stock and had suffered a diminution in range, for by this time it had become restricted to the great prairie of the American west. By about 12,950 years ago a group of Indians had begun to manufacture a new kind of stone point in order to exploit this resource, and in so doing would change the buffalo forever.

When President Grover Cleveland wed Frances Folsom in 1886, he unwittingly changed the way that we would think of America's first post-Clovis culture. Cleveland's wife had lived for a time in Ragtown, New Mexico. The town had been founded in 1858 as a railroad construction camp and in 1888 its citizens were so overwhelmed at the good fortune of their girl next door that they changed its name in her honour. Folsom it was from then on, which would mean little to anyone if it had not been for a remarkable African-American cowboy who settled in the area, and the discoveries he made.

George McJunkin was one of those people who seemed to be curious about everything. A childhood spent in slavery had deprived him of an education, but after being freed by Union forces in 1865 at the age of fourteen, he took up the life of a cowboy on the Crowfoot Ranch near Ragtown. There, the indomitable George got the sons of a rancher to teach him to read. He eventually became a much sought-after fiddler, an amateur surveyor, astronomer, maker of survey instruments and in time the respected foreman of the ranch. Notwithstanding these achievements, George's real passion lay in the study of natural history. Wherever he went he picked up curios that he kept in a small museum atop his fireplace. There, stone arrowheads competed for space with fossilised animal bones and the skull of a prehistoric Indian.1

In 1908 McJunkin was out breaking horses at a place he called the Wild Horse Arroyo when he spotted a large bone protruding from the side of an erosion gully. He dismounted and dug carefully around the bone, only to find that it was attached to another. McJunkin knew that he had stumbled across something important, recognising the bones as belonging to a very large bison-like creature. He returned so often to excavate his finds that the place became known as ‘McJunkin's bone pit’. In an effort to convince others of the importance of the discovery, McJunkin wrote letters to friends describing it. When he died in 1922, before a professional excavation could be organised, his friends gave him a cowboy's send-off, lowering him into his grave on their lariats. They also remembered the discovery and in 1926, along with Jesse Figgins, Harold Cook and Marie Wormington from the Colorado Museum of Natural History, finally carried out the long-planned dig. What they found astounded them and revolutionised our understanding of American prehistory.

As the team dug they uncovered the near-perfect skeletons of several giant bison. This was a spectacular enough find in itself, but what really put the place on the map was the discovery of a meticulously crafted stone point, once used to tip a wooden spear, between the ribs of one of the fallen giants. Here was evidence that the great, long-horned bison entombed in McJunkin's bone pit had been felled by the hand of man.

In 1926 it was widely believed that Indians had been resident in North America for just a few thousand years. The discovery at first generated disbelief at the co-occurrence of a spear point with the bones of extinct creatures, but further excavation of the site, attended by some of America's most sceptical scientists, convinced even the worst doubting Thomas of the authenticity of the association. At one stroke of the trowel North America had been granted a deep human prehistory and the down-at-heel town of Folsom gave its name to an entire stone-tool tradition and a long-vanished culture.2

We now know that Folsom-style stone points were made over a period of 700 years, from between about 12,950 and 12,250 years ago. It is obvious that their manufacture was a labour of love, for few people anywhere have ever crafted such elegant artefacts from stone. The points are closely worked to give them a sharp edge, and are deeply fluted on their sides. Fluting involves striking a long flake off each side of the flattened blade, thinning it considerably and giving it concave rather than convex surfaces. It is a risky operation, for the point is liable to break as the flake is struck off. It has the virtue, however, of producing a more penetrating point whose concave sides allow a wound to bleed freely. Such points are ideal for quickly killing the giant long-horned bison which, being more fleet than an elephant, can run many miles before expiring unless severely weakened. George Mcjunkin's bone pit revealed that some 12,900 years ago, twenty-three long-horned bison met their deaths via the tips of several dozen of these points.³

The transition from Clovis to Folsom is important because in it we see one of the first regional cultural differentiations in North America. Folsom was centred in the west, where the buffalo roam.

Folsom soon gave way to a simpler variation in that these new points were not fluted. By 12,000 years ago the use of spears to hunt bison was perhaps becoming obsolete, for mass kills often involving hundreds of animals reveal that Piano people (those who made the newer points) had begun to drive-hunt rather than spear the great beasts. With large amounts of meat becoming available to these smallish groups there was inevitable waste. At the Olsen-Chubbuck site in eastern Colorado, for example, nineteen of the 193 bison killed were not even touched by the hunters while another thirty were only partially butchered. This waste, however, seems minimal when compared with that of nineteenth-century Europeans, who slaughtered bison merely for their tongues or skins, with just one skin making it to market for every five animals slaughtered.4

Although the Folsom and Piano people hunted a wide variety of animals including antelope, elk, deer and coyote and also harvested a variety of plants, excavation of their campsites shows that long-horned bison was their principal prey. The survival of an entire group must have frequently depended upon the success of a bison hunt, and Folsom culture was doubtless shaped by bison just as plains Indian cultures were in historic times. It is equally true, however, that Indian cultures shaped the bison. The proof of this is in the fossil record, for it tells us that bison were very different creatures before humans disturbed the New World.⁵

Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska is perhaps the foremost living expert on the evolution of the bison, both fossil and modern. In July 1979 fate handed him a key that would permit him to fully understand how bison had changed over time. In that month a gold miner working north of Fairbanks, Alaska, called the university to say that he had uncovered the remains of a large creature. The find, made just as Guthrie was about to go on sabbatical to Europe, turned out to be a complete, albeit scavenged, mummy of an extinct kind of bison known as Bison priscus.

The bull had been felled in his prime, and his appearance was striking, for over the thousands of years he had lain buried a coating of vivianite crystals had stained his skin bright blue. When Guthrie saw the beast he was reminded of the Disney stories about Paul Bunyan and Babe, a legendary blue ox that accompanied Bunyan on his adventures. Guthrie's own Blue Babe—as he dubbed his find—was to lead the palaeontologist on an adventure back through 36,000 years of four-dimensional bio-space to reveal an almost unimaginable saga of bison history.6

Analysing the mummified and frozen remains—which included red meat, fat, hair and some organs—was to occupy Guthrie for years. In time his painstaking study of this unique specimen would reveal in enormous detail how bison appeared, lived and died 36,000 years ago. Most importantly, Guthrie argues, comparisons with living bison show just how much they have changed; as an Alaskan bison Blue Babe was drawn from the population that would give rise to the living North American plains and woodland bison.

Blue Babe lived at a time when mammoths, horses, bison and caribou were the main herbivores of the Alaskan tundra. The now extinct stag-moose and the living musk ox were also present, but in smaller numbers. These creatures formed the prey of just two principal predators—wolves and lions. At first Guthrie suspected that wolves had killed Blue Babe. After an exhaustive autopsy, however, he was able to determine that it was lions that had pulled down the 800-kilogram bison bull. They had dispatched him by suffocation, one placing its mouth over his muzzle (in the process leaving much bruising), just as African lions do with Cape buffalo today. One lion had even left a sizeable portion of its carnassial (meat-slicing) tooth in Blue Babe's frozen hide, presumably when it came back to try to feed on the frozen carcass.

Blue Babe had just enough meat taken off his bones to feed a few hungry lions, leading Guthrie to deduce that Alaskan lions lived and hunted in small prides—perhaps containing as few as two or three. As befits such unsociable creatures, the males probably lacked the huge dark manes used by their African counterparts to frighten off rivals intent on poaching their harems. Instead, Alaskan lions resembled the almost maneless lions that still survive in the Gir Forest of India, as well as those depicted in European cave art of 20,000 years ago.

Blue Babe was killed at the beginning of winter and his body quickly froze. Next spring it was covered by sediment that was washed down-slope by heavy rainfall, quickly burying the body and preventing it from rotting in summer. The preservation of the corpse was so good in fact that, to celebrate the end of his studies, Guthrie invited a few colleagues to share a stew made from part of Blue Babe's neck. He went on to record that ‘the meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it’.7

The most noticeable difference between Blue Babe and living bison were his horns. These were enormous by plains bison (Bison bison bison) standards, and stuck out rather than curving sharply upward, a characteristic marking Blue Babe as a member of a species known as the giant long-horned bison (Bison priscus). Although nothing like Bison priscus exists today, Guthrie discovered that it is not extinct, just irrevocably transformed by evolution into something else.

Blue Babe, Guthrie says, looked like a dark bay horse; a rich dark brown with black points on the face, legs and tail. This is very different from the typical colouration of plains bison bulls, which have jet-black forequarters and a contrasting sandy-coloured hump. Blue Babe also lacks ‘pantaloons'—those long tufts of fur that give the forelegs of plains bison such a distinctive appearance—though he is significantly larger, as well as larger relative to his cows, than a contemporary plains bison bull.

More curious differences emerged as Guthrie began to study Blue Babe's bones. His hump (which unfortunately had been mostly eaten away by hungry lions) was different in shape from that of plains bison, suggesting that his head was held higher off the ground. The arc of Blue Babe's lower incisor arcade was also narrower, indicating that he took less in with each bite than does a plains bison. These differences may seem to be disparate in nature, even random perhaps, but Guthrie showed that they all stem from a single cause—a tendency for bison to congregate in larger herds.

One of the most telling differences of this shift is the change in the relative size of bulls and cows. A discrepancy in size between the sexes in grazing animals often occurs when males and females forage separately for part or most of the year. Blue Babe, Guthrie has suggested, could have grown so much larger than his cows only if he spent the growing season feeding alone in the areas of best forage, which he must have defended from all comers. Plains bison bulls are not that much larger than their cows because they must feed in competition with the thousands, if not millions, of individuals of both sexes around them. This restricts their access to good food and thus limits their size.

The drab colour of Blue Babe's coat and his absence of pantaloons also indicate that he foraged away from his females. He did not need to stand out in colour because his large size and his location indicated that he was a dominant bull capable of finding and defending the best territory. Plains bison bulls face a much more difficult task attracting females because they are just one not-very-large animal in an enormous crowd. The key to their dilemma, it turns out, lies in advertising by way of colour and display. Plains bison bulls differ from cows in their enormous black forequarters (emphasised by their pantaloons) and their contrasting sandy hump. These features advertise a bull's masculinity and strength, in effect saying to the cows—look what a fine beast I am!

It was Blue Babe's long horns, however, that provided conclusive evidence of an ecological shift. Today, plains bison bulls compete by engaging in the spectacular sport of head-butting. They run towards each other at full speed, clashing head-on with a loud and violent shock. This spectacular tactic is guaranteed to grab a female's attention, even in a crowd, for the commotion is audible more than a kilometre away. Had Blue Babe used his horns for head-butting they would have been broken by the shock. Short, curled horns are less vulnerable and far more effective as battering rams.

This difference led Guthrie to propose that Blue Babe used the less spectacular but equally deadly method of pushing to overcome rival bulls, just as cattle do today. In such contests the combatants look for a vulnerable area in which to thrust a sharp horn tip. Long, outward-directed horns provide a marked advantage because they can skirt round the protective horns of an opponent, thrusting deep into the shoulder. Guthrie has found fossil shoulder bones of long-horned bison bearing holes that neatly fit Blue Babe's horn tips, which supports his idea. Their bearers may well have died in combat, for the injuries show no sign of healing.

The plains bison's hump shape, lowered head and incisor width also indicate adjustments to life in the crowd. Plains bison occurred in such vast numbers that they cropped the grass into short ‘buffalo lawns’. Such lawns are a nutritious source of food but each mouthful is competed for by the hundreds of other giant lawnmowers in the herd. For a plains bison to be successful in feeding it has to keep its head to the ground, taking broad bites that yield lots of food with each swipe. Their high hump aids in this, for it is in effect a cantilever that saves energy by ensuring that the ‘at rest’ position of the head is near the ground. In comparison, Blue Babe would have held his head high while at rest, scanning the horizon for predators trying to sneak up on the solitary animal. When he ate, his narrower incisor region allowed him to be more selective, plucking only the most nutritious of plants.

Life in a herd has many disadvantages. In addition to increased competition for food and a mate the chance of contracting gut parasites is increased, as is that of catching any infectious disease. If life in a herd is so challenging, why did the plains bison adopt the lifestyle so dramatically over such a brief period of time? The answer lies, it seems, in the dangers that plains bison faced. Herd behaviour is often a response to the presence of predators that can easily pick off isolated individuals or small groups. Such predators find it much more difficult to kill one of a herd, where the vigilance of a thousand eyes and the horns of companions affords protection.

The Great Plains and its contiguous grassed environments form the largest grassland in the world. It is a difficult place to hide, so it comes as no surprise to learn that the herding behaviour of buffalo was developed to its apogee there. By the time the plains bison inherited this realm, however, most of the great predators—sabretooth, lion, short-faced bear and dire wolf—were gone. There were only three predators capable of hunting adult bison: wolves, grizzlies and Folsom or Piano point-wielding men. Wolves of one sort or another had always been there to hunt weak or vulnerable bison, so their presence does not explain this behavioural shift, nor does that of grizzlies because carnivorous bears had also long been present in North America. Humans are thus the only force capable of ‘making’ the plains bison.

There is clear evidence in the fossil record that the Piano people were herd-driving by about 12,000 years ago. In order to hunt buffalo this way you must have beasts that associate in herds. It may be that the earlier Folsom hunters made the lives of individual buffalo, or those living in small groups, so precarious that by 12,000 years ago bison had already begun to congregate in larger numbers.

Archaeological studies from the mountainous country in the west, such as the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, show that hunting pressure may indeed have been intense from an early date. They reveal that long-horned bison once lived there, but that they apparently disappeared along with the rest of the megafauna about 13,000 years ago. Bison can clearly survive in such country as their modern presence in Yellowstone illustrates, so their absence from such areas in earlier Indian times is puzzling. It seems possible that the rugged terrain prevented them from forming the great herds that constituted their best defence against the human predator, and that the smaller groups were simply picked off one by one by Indian hunters.8

Stephen Pyne, that great historian of fire, thinks that an even more curious synergy existed between bison and Indians. Bison needed grassy plains in order to benefit from their new herding strategy, and it seems that such plains increased through the Indian use of fire over the past thousand years. It was about then that the bison crossed the Mississippi, for example, and by the sixteenth century fire had opened enough forest for them to invade the south. By the seventeenth century the same thing had happened in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and the bison penetrated there too. An alternative argument is that reduced hunting pressure resulting from a disease-devastated post-Columbian Indian population permitted the bison expansion. All this leads me to believe that while a symbol of the ‘wild west’, beloved of the wildest of ‘wild’ Indians and a victim of the likes of Buffalo Bill, the bison is a human artefact, for it was shaped by Indians and its distribution determined by them.⁹

Studies of fossils reveal something of the timing of the size reduction of bison as well as changes in the shape of their horns. Judging from the diameter of their eye sockets, paleontologists have determined that bison have been shrinking in size throughout the last 12,000 years, shrinking most over the last 5000 years. The study of their horns reveals a somewhat different picture, for these have steadily reduced in size over the past 12,000 years. Similar dwarfing is also seen in many other large mammals including bighorn sheep, elk, moose, musk ox, bears, American antelope, wolves and wolverines to name a few. All decreased in size over the last 10,000 years.10

The size that a creature reaches is very much dependent upon its nutrition. Specially fed bighorn sheep and elk can attain enormous dimensions and have superb horns and antlers. Furthermore, all species have fluctuated in their average dimensions through time, and the late Pleistocene—between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago—was a time of true giants. Dale Guthrie calls the great herbivores of this golden age megabucks, megabulls and megarams.¹¹ Because of the influence that climate and food availability have on size, these two factors were thought to be the sole cause of the dwarfing of North America's mammals. I think, however, that hunting by or competition from humans exerted the greatest influence and precipitated much of the dwarfing experienced by large mammals over the last 12,000 years.

Human hunting can clearly lead to size reduction, as has happened in many historic fisheries, for neither cod nor lobster are what they were in grand-dad's day. Hunting pressure can cause dwarfing when it is intense and focused on the largest individuals, resulting in selection for early-maturing dwarfs. These are animals that cease to grow early in order to reproduce before they are taken by a hunter. Just as with cod, human hunting, I think, acted preferentially against the largest individuals of all Guthrie's mega’ species. The size change among large ungulates may have occurred because most hunters tended to select the largest individuals, just as modern hunters do today. In smaller species such as armadillos, however, the dwarfing occurred because the larger individuals found it harder to hide from humans.

In both Australia and North America dwarfing of species as a survival response coincides with the arrival of humans and not with climate change. In Australia, kangaroos and possibly other large marsupials had begun to shrink by 40,000 years ago while in the Americas dwarfing began 12,000 or 13,000 years ago.12 This is still an active area of research, and, with two very different theories to test, advances can be expected in the near future.