A New Approach to the Quantitative Analysis of Bone Surface Modifications: the Bowser Road Mastodon and Implications for the Data to Understand Human-Megafauna Interactions in North America

Toward the end of the Pleistocene, the world experienced a mass extinction of megafauna. In North America these included its proboscideans—the mammoths and mastodons. Researchers in conservation biology, paleontology, and archaeology have debated the role played by human predation in these extinctions. They point to traces of human butchery, such as cut marks and other…

Intensification mechanisms driving dietary change among the Great Plains big game hunters of North America

Boresup’s Theory of subsistence intensification is that as human populations grow, they give up “efficient” food-producing behaviors to increase the total food yield over a given unit of time or space. Anthropologists have vigorously debated this concept during the latter part of the twentieth century. They have proposed that dietary specialization and dietary diversification are…