Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino

Prehistory > Cultural evolution > Ways of Life

Hunters of the Megafauna

The Americas were first populated near the end of the Pleistocene, when environmental conditions were completely different from those presently in force, as the continent was in a transition period between the Ice Age and a modern climatic regime. Thus, temperatures were lower, and much of the land was still covered in ice. In this environment, populations of large herbivores such as the mastodon, the giant sloth, the American horse and the American camel flourished throughout the Americas. All of these so-called megafauna are now extinct. These animals migrated from Asia over the land bridge that spanned what is today the Bering Strait, the same bridge that enabled successive waves of humans to reach the Americas and settle these lands.
Many of these early groups specialized in hunting the Pleistocene megafauna, though they undoubtedly supplemented their diet by gathering root vegetables, fruit and nuts and hunting smaller animals. However, the social organization required to hunt these large herbivores—which usually lived in herds—and the large quantity of resources they provided, required these early groups to maintain a certain way of life. Through their hunting they obtained food in the form of meat and fat, hides for their shelters and clothing, and bones and tendons for tools.
 

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