asserted a broader native tradition of fertilizing with a sort of herring called
menhaden, however. Menhaden are intensely netted today, notably along
the South Atlantic coast and principally for fertilizer, so a logical continuity
is suggested that complements the recent consensus that Indians main-
tained large permanent fields. Yet thorough investigations during the last
decades of the twentieth century reveal no evidence of natives using fishes
in such a wasteful (not to mention disrespectful) manner. Fish bones found
at sites throughout eastern North America were almost certainly household
refuse, likely thrown into middens that became gardens.^21 Bones, then, may
have been either inadvertent or deliberate—and chemically appropriate—
fertilizer for kitchen gardens. The legend of whole-fish fertilization of large
fields never made sense in a continent still howling with wolves and semi-
wild dogs, not to mention raccoons and other varmints prone to dig about
for nourishment. Imagine a native communal plantation, an investment
in communal food security for a coming winter, ripped asunder, seeds and
seedlings tossed about, broken, and ruined by scroungy eaters of rotten
fish.
A more important controversy regarding native conservation, still unre-
solved after nearly four decades, is the palynologist and geochronologist
Paul Martin’s explanation of one of the Americas’ most perplexing prehis-
toric phenomena: the relatively sudden extinction, about , years ago,
of both continents’ megafauna. Enormous tusked herbivores such as mas-
todons and mammoths (elephantlike creatures); single-humped camels;
giant ground sloths, tapirs, and beavers; shrub oxen the size of bison; and
others resembling nothing we have seen alive all disappeared, as did many
carnivores, including dire wolves with huge, hyenalike heads; big cats with
fearsome teeth of several shapes; and bears apparently capable of swift pur-
suit of prey. All came swiftly to oblivion, and according to Martin, ‘‘Man,
and man alone, was responsible,’’ during the approximately two millen-
nia required for immigrants from Asia to walk from Beringia to the Atlan-
tic to Punta del Fuego. Why—and how—could these people called Paleo-
indians have accomplished such slaughter, a ‘‘Blitzkrieg,’’ as Martin termed
it? Paleoindians brought big-game hunting experience and effective lances
with longish ‘‘Clovis’’ stone points from Asia. There (and in Africa and
Europe) animals large and small had shared landscape with predatory hu-
mans since all life forms had evolved. American animals evolved without
humans for million years, so they were innocent of hunters, perhaps
even curious, and therefore the easiest of prey. Paleoindians fueled their
progress southward and eastward with cheap meat, then, so abundant