The giant-hyena-exclusion model is rather similar to the suggestion that
Valerius Geist made some years ago, namely that human colonisation of
North America was delayed by the presence of short-faced bear, Arctodus
simus. The early dog date is interesting, though perhaps not such a
surprise in view of the DNA evidence for early dog/wolf separation.
Terry O'Connor
Igel Küchelmann wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> just found this report in the South African Palaeo News. Although it's
> rather superficial and I even do not agree with the man versus hyena theorie
> it claims, I think the report of a 14 000 years old domesticated dog skull
> in Siberia may be of interest for colleagues concerned with dog research.
> Here it is:
>
> Source: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DyeHard/dyehard.html
>
> When People Fled Hyenas
> Oversized Hyenas May Have Delayed Human Arrival in North America
>
> By Lee Dye
> Special to ABCNEWS.com
>
> Nov. 20 ‹ Deep inside a cave in Siberia's Altai Mountains, Christy Turner
> and his Russian colleagues may have found an answer to a question that has
> hounded him for more than three decades.
>
>
> As a young anthropologist, Turner spent time in Alaska's Aleutian Islands
> in the 1970s, working at several archaeological sites and occasionally
> gazing westward toward Siberia.
>
> "I thought, 'That's the place that Native Americans came from,' " he says
> now from his laboratory at Arizona State University in Tempe.
>
> But why, he wondered then as he still wonders today, did it take them so
> long?
>
> The Bering Land Bridge that the first Americans crossed into the New World
> from Siberia had been there for thousands of years before those first
> immigrants arrived, most likely around 12,000 years ago. Archaeological
> evidence suggests the bridge surfaced repeatedly for at least 40,000 years
> as seawater became trapped in glaciers during the last Ice Age.
>
> North America was one of the last places on the planet to be populated by
> humans, and "there has to have been a series of things that kept people out
> of the New World until very, very late," Turner says.
>
> The evidence he and his colleagues have uncovered, he says, suggests that
> one player in that drama may have been a most unlikely, and yet terrifying,
> villain.
>
> The hyena.
>
> Human-Hungry Hyenas?
>
> Ancient hyenas were larger than their relatives found today in Asia and
> Africa, and even the modern hyena has a jaw so powerful it can crush the leg
> of a rhinoceros, Turner says. Modern hyenas tend to be fearless in the
> presence of humans, and they have been known to drag a human hunter from a
> tent in Africa and crush his bones like toothpicks.
>
> Could it be that the human migration into the Americas was held up by a
> nasty beast that preyed on people in the darkness of night, forcing them to
> remain far south of the land bridge that would have taken them to a new
> world?
>
> Turner is the first to admit he doesn't know the answer to that. Not enough
> evidence is in yet to draw any strong conclusions, so at this point this is
> all scientific theorizing. But the clues so far are tantalizing.
>
> Turner made his first of many expeditions to Siberia in 1979, and as one of
> the pillars of anthropology in the United States, he has become good friends
> with many of his counterparts in the former Soviet Union. He has been able
> to share in their research, including the artifacts they have uncovered in
> the far North.
>
> "In all of the excavations that my Russian colleagues have been doing across
> Siberia, they can find almost no human remains," he says. "That's very
> interesting because if you go anywhere else with an equally good climate,
> almost always you find a little bit of human bone here and there."
>
> Farther south, at about the latitude of Mongolia, "there are hundreds and
> hundreds of [human] archaeological sites that go back 50,000 to 60,000 years
> ago," he says, but just a few degrees north and the sites are no older than
> 12,000 years.
>
> Clues in Crushed Bones
>
> So Turner began to suspect that perhaps hyenas, running in packs of 40 to
> 50, may have been intimidating enough to keep those early humans well south
> of the region where hyenas roamed in great numbers.
>
> Part of the evidence comes from a remarkable cave that was occupied solely
> by hyenas for about 40,000 years. Turner, who is also a dental
> anthropologist, examined bones found in the cave and concluded that all of
> the animals in the cave were dragged there by hyenas.
>
> Most animals gnaw at a bone, or rip it open with slicing molars, but a hyena
> just crushes it. Even a bear can't do that. The bones found in the cave,
> Turner says, were clearly there because of the hyenas.
>
> But one set of bones especially intrigues Turner.
>
> "We found a true dog skull," he says. "We've dated the skull to about 14,000
> years ago, and it's a domesticated dog," so much smaller than a wolf that it
> would not have survived if it had not been domesticated. The dog, he adds,
> was dragged into the cave, where it was devoured by hyenas.
>
> It's the oldest dog ever found in Siberia, Turner says, and it was
> domesticated just before humans started their migration north, leading them
> eventually to the Americas.
>
> "The coincidence is so remarkable," he says. "Once we get the dog, then we
> get people in the new world almost immediately."
>
> Dogs Save the Day
>
> Although at this point it's largely guesswork, Turner thinks it's quite
> possible that those early Siberians domesticated the dog in an effort to
> protect themselves from hyenas. A dog will bark at anything that approaches
> its territory, so barking dogs might have helped keep hyenas away from
> hunting camps.
>
> At the very least, it would have alerted humans to an approaching horde of
> bone-crushing beasts.
>
> That, Turner theorizes, might have finally given humans the edge, allowing
> them to encroach further into land thick with hyenas.
>
> Eventually, the humans found the bridge across the Bering Sea, about 2,000
> years before the hyenas themselves, along with many other larger animals,
> died out.
>
> There are many uncertainties and gaps in the archaeological record, because
> the hyena has been largely ignored by anthropologists, Turner says.
>
> But if he's right, those nasty critters kept us out of here for thousands of
> years, and dogs finally let us in.
>
> --
> KNOCHENARBEIT
>
> Hans Christian Küchelmann
> Diplom-Biologe
>
> Use Akschen 4 € 28237 Bremen
> tel: 0421 / 61 99 177
> fax: 0421 / 691 80 62
> mail: [log in to unmask]
> web: www.knochenarbeit.de
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