that much must have been left to rot after egregiously nonconservationist
slaughters. Thus native American history began in waste and corrupted any
future claims to moral authority—or so claimed some antienvironmental-
ists during the late s and s.^22
Martin’s version of Pleistocene extinctions would seem to merge neatly
with much more recent archaeological evidence supporting monumental
bison kills in western North America, especially at ‘‘Buffalo Jumps.’’ Here
peoples such as the Blackfoot drove great numbers of bison, sometimes
hundreds of them, representing as much as , pounds of meat, over
cliffs into ravines. A few scholars conjure estimates of efficient butcher-
ing; others calculate enormous waste. Natives effectively employed firing
of prairie grasses in such hunts. When natives acquired horses from Euro-
pean intruders, beginning in the sixteenth century, their requirements for
hides accelerated—they enlarged their houses—and hunts yielded propor-
tionately yet more bison. There is some evidence, too, that even before Indi-
ans responded to white American and European markets for hides, they
killed and sometimes took only favored parts of animals—humps, for in-
stance, and tongues and fetuses. Some native ethnography denies this, but
a Plains myth on the origins of the buffalo reinforces what conservationists
must deem waste: Namely, many Indians believed that bison derived from
great prairies below lakes, which nurtured limitless supplies. So because
buffaloes came from another world, humans could never kill too many in
this world. The lake prairies would forever yield more.
Humans seldom live by meat alone. As the anthropologist Shepard Krech
observes, Martin and his supporters ignored not only small animals and
birds, which also suffered massive late-Pleistocene extinctions, but the
availability of many edible plants for convenient human sustenance. Ar-
chaic, Woodland, and Mississippian native cultures all gathered, even as
they hunted and fished; so why not Paleoindians as well? Severe climatic
change during the Pleistocene period might well have affected fauna large
and small, with or without spear-carriers’ carnage. On the other hand (as
Krech also observes), well-documented parallel cases tend to support Mar-
tin. Even as Woodland cultures evolved into Mississippian in North Amer-
ica, Polynesian invaders came to Hawaii and New Zealand and utterly trans-
formed both archipelagoes, where literally thousands of species, especially
of birds, disappeared, long before Europeans arrived. Something compa-
rable occurred, too, on the large island of Madagascar. Indonesian and East
African settlers arrived—apparently during a long drought—and soon pres-
sure on resources, the hunt not least among them, sent a stunning variety of