Yellowstone's Northern Range - Greater Yellowstone Science ...

THE NORTHERN RANGE
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et al. (1991) said that in Wyoming sites, the lack of
elk remains may mean that elk were rare, or it may
mean that the people occupying these sites preferred
other species, or that the locations of the
sites were not in elk habitat and were therefore "not
conducive to the deposition of elk." Cannon
(1992) surveyed the ethnographic literature and
offered a number of reasons why elk were relatively
rare in the archeological record. He said, for
example, that "the mountain hunting pattern, as
described for the Shoshone, would tend not to
produce numerous elk remains due to transport cost
of elements." In lay terms, this means that single
human hunters might have de-boned meat where a
large animal fell, rather than trying to CaITy the
entire carcass to a distant camp. Furthermore,
Hadly (1990) has suggested that relying too heavily
upon archeological evidence has led to "simplistic
interpretation of limited data." Hadly pointed out
that elk appear in most levels at Lamar Cave, and
are in fact "the most common ungulate in the
Lamar Cave faunal assemblage."
A related question involves the extent to
which Indians affected the numbers of elk and
other animals. Hadly (1990), Cannon (1992), and
Kay (1994b) all show that elk numbers increased in
the archeological and paleontological record in the
northern Rocky Mountains at some time in the past
several hundred years. Whether this meant that elk
numbers were actually increasing, or that humans
were an important factor in controlling elk herd
sizes, is a matter of debate. Cannon (1992) said
that "a peak [in elk numbers] in the Late Holocene
may reflect increased numbers through time, an
increase in human predation, or simply sampling
bias." Lahren (1976) believed it was "improbable,
during any time of the year, that the hunter-gatherer
populations ever operated at a level which significantly
affected the evidently large biomass" of
their prey in the upper Yellowstone River Valley.
More dramatically, Kay (1994a, 1995a) has
proposed that prehistorically, predation by humans
and other carnivores suppressed ungulate numbers
in Yellowstone to extremely low levels. Kay
(1995a) and Wagner et al. (1995a) point to recent
estimates of the Native American human population
of North America in 1492 being as high as
100,000,000 as an indication that humans were
indeed numerous enough to suppress ungulate
numbers to very low levels. However, their own
citations do not support them. Wagner et al. do not
provide sources for their statement, but probably
relied on Kay (1995a), who cites Dobyns (1983)
and Ramenofsky (1987) in support of his statement
that "North America was not a 'wilderness' waiting
to be 'discovered,' but instead was home to more
than 100 million Native Americans before European-introduced
diseases decimated their numbers."
But these citations say no such thing.
Dobyns (1983), for example, whose pre-Columbian
population estimates have been the most extreme
and controversially high (Denevan 1992), estimated
that the human population of the entire New
World-that is North, Central, and South
America-was around 100 million, most of whom
lived in Mexico, Central and South America.
Dobyns (1983) estimated that the pre-Columbian
population of North America was about 18 million,
most of whom lived in the east, in the Mississippi
Valley, or along the west coast (Dobyns estimated
722,000 lived in Florida alone). Perhaps Kay
misread Dobyns' estimate for all of the New World
as an estimate for only North America, and Wagner
et al. then copied Kay's error. It is important to
note, in addition, that pre-Columbian population
estimates as high as Dobyns' are not the most
favored among historians, anthropologists, and
archeologists. A more typical estimate of the North
American human population in 1492 would be
"nearly seven million" (Kennedy 1994), most of
whom lived on the Atlantic seaboard or in the
Mississippi Valley.
Exercises that provide plausible scenarios for
pre-Columbian human influences on wildlife
populations and therefore on ecosystems in general
are important and should be pursued. To date,
however, they are all hypothetical or conjectural,
and none are yet supported by convincing evidence
in the case of Yellowstone, a high, isolated, and
relatively unpopulated region when compared to
the east and west coasts of North America.
Janetski (1987) quotes Larocque, a French­
Canadian trapper who visited Crow Indian villages
north and east of the present Yellowstone National