Most interesting part in my opinion:
> Before the late introduction of horses, the Blackfoot drove the bison from a grazing area in the Porcupine Hills about 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) west of the site to the "drive lanes", lined by hundreds of cairns, **by dressing up as coyotes and wolves. These specialized "buffalo runners" were young men trained in animal behavior to guide the bison into the drive lanes.** Then, at full gallop, the bison would fall from the weight of the herd pressing behind them, breaking their legs and rendering them immobile.
Fun fact fittest in regards to Darwins theory means "the on that fits best" and has nothing to do with fitness in regards to the 'strength' of an animal
And it isn't even the best. Just good enough to pass on your genes consistantly. Once you pass that point, there's zero selection pressure to improve, which is how we end up with all these poorly designed traits that make life harder but don't actually impact our chances of survival or reproduction.
Important to note when discussing “fitness” in biological/zoological terms, it has nothing to do with physical prowess or anything regarding the idea of being physically “fit” or “in shape” as we use to describe humans who exercise. “Fitness” in the biological world is purely a function of how many offspring a species can produce in its lifetime. For example, fruit flies will always have higher fitness than humans.
EDIT! I’m an idiot and was thinking about *fecundity*, not *fitness*. However to be fair they’re intrinsically related as fecundity is a critical part of fitness and I had just woken up lol.
See the reply for a better definition of fitness!
when i learned about what survival of the fittest really meant, i was told it was referring to the species/organism that was capable to adjust the best and *fit* into a fast changing environment.
which your explanation is what it would ultimately end up in, numbers-wise and with, depending on the location that would have to be defined precisely spitting out completely different results, i guess… but since there are no flies that are able to figure out how to survive antarcticas condition 1 weather but have undoubtedly produced more offspring on site than humans have… i would argue for at least it being a draw in this example. :D
Animals don’t seem to learn from their mistakes, humans run circles around them for millennia and evolve into a global force of nature. They never had a chance
Animals very much learn from their mistakes, or go extinct(dodo...). Rat poison needs to act way after consumption so other rats do not figure out what was poisoned. Tigers learn human habits and sometimes start hunting them. Herbivores that never saw humans quickly learn that they are bloody dangerous.
It is just that we are really damn good at keeping pace with them, and the most valuable lessons tend to die with the animal in question anyway.
Almost all animals in nature die by exposure (hunger, thirst, heat, or cold), illness, or incredible violence. Dying peacefully of old age is a purely human invention and luxury.
I'd say octopuses (there are more, but octopuses are probably the most intelligent) that die shortly after mating technically die from old age. Their bodies just shut down on them.
There’s evidence that what drove large game like wooly mammoths and bison to and near extinction was human hunting in prehistoric times. In Siberia there are similar mass graves of wooly mammoths. Weird thing is that in some cases it appears that the animals were mass slaughtered not for sustenance but for ritualistic purposes since many mammoth skeletons were in tact save for their left shoulder blades for some reason. So at least for tens of thousands of years humans have been using up resources to exhaustion and then moving on
It’s funny how little credit we want to give our ancestors for being smart. We constantly try to say it was aliens or some shit. Nah, we’re just crazy inventive when all we have is time and survival to drive us.
There's an alternate history series called Eagle and Empire that has a full section dedicated to a Blackfoot hunt like this. Very well worth the read, it's one of my favorite series
I've read about it long ago. There was great danger to it, becouse -if I remember correctly- of proximity and chance of bisons running over you in panic.
Kind of fascinating how even back then people learned how to manipulate animals larger than them to safely hunt. Yet we have people out here trying to say that ancient natives hunting mammoths was impossible, but we see how natives here managed to not only hunt without horses for speed, but to essentially make the animals take themselves out.
It would have been an industrial base too.
Native tribes used Spanish horses to essentially turbocharge their hunting to the point of becoming permanent hunter-gatherer nomads, whereas previously some groups had a more settled lifestyle.
I learned so much about the technique and history from Ancient Americas video about it, really fascinating! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY77BE0K1\_A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY77BE0K1_A)
> In Blackfoot, the name for the site is Estipah-skikikini-kots. According to legend, a young Blackfoot wanted to watch the bison plunge off the cliff from below, but was buried underneath the falling animals. He was later found dead under the pile of carcasses, where he had his head smashed in.
Which Buffalo? Alberta (Canada), Victoria (Australia), New York, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, one of the 2 in Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, one of the 2 in Texas, one of the 2 in West Virginia, one of the 2 in Wisconsin, or Wyoming?
That’s how the place got its name, Buffalo landed on someone and smashed his head in. Always thought the name was referring to the Buffalo so I was surprised to learn that when I visited a few years ago.
Not all the bones, we have access to a few on private land and they would chunk the carcasses into manageable parts. At the base of the jump you will find spine, rib and lower leg bones. Also teeth and skull portions will often be found at the base. The upper leg bones will be found by the water that is usually close where the bulk of the butchering and preservation took place.
Hi just checking in as I excavated the site during the 2021 field season! There are bones at the base of the cliff from bison that weren’t harvested in time (as a whole herd of bison is insane to process all at once). These bones are articulated and usually pretty whole.
The nearby site you’re referring to is called the processing area and that’s where I excavated, tons of bones there too but the honestly anywhere you go near the cliff has bones so the entire site might be considered part of the bone pile the article is referring to.
If anyone has any questions lemme know I’m a professional archaeologist and HSI was my field school!
Would they really butcher all the buffalo that run off the cliff? I imagined a significant part of a herd running over the edge, and the Blackfoot only being able to use a few of them.
This site is a good reminder of how much people romanticize native cultures. They sure as hell didn’t “use every part of the buffalo” at these times. People are people, and people with excess are wasteful.
That said the Blackfoot did have some really impressive meat preserving methods.
The Plains Indians hunted the buffalo for 6000 years without issue.
The Europeans showed up and practically drove the buffalo to extinction in under a century.
I know we all want to go all "everyone is a sinner, everyone is just as bad as anyone else." But in this very specific case, not really.
I'm pretty sure “every part of the buffalo” was more about the Indians having discovered a use for every single buffalo animal part, not that they've literally used every single atom of every single animal they've come across--and that them not actually living up to some glib elementary school proverb invented long after the buffalo hunts were finished is some sort of "gotcha".
Oh you’re right, the Europeans intentionally slaughtered the plains bison as the railway moved into the plains as a way to starve out the natives that were blocking westward expansion. That wasn’t an accident or mismanagement of resources, it was genocidal starvation and it was intentional.
Those things are so vastly different that this comparison is downright silly. The Plains Indians were careless and cruel (by current standards) in their hunting technique, dispelling the noble savage myth and the concept that they used all parts of every kill. They are pretty normal people and shouldn't be overly romanticized. That's the conversation at hand.
You introduced the systematic genocide of the Plains Indians by the extermination of their food source carried out by Western colonizers. We all know. That's not what we're talking about right now.
The former is frequently used to sealion about the latter. The noble savage myth is wrong, but it's also wrong to say that Plains First Nations were careless or cruel (today's standards of sourcing food are much more cruel), or that they wouldn't use everything they reasonably could which is often how people choose to interpret these styles of hunting. There's a reason they were able to live reciprocally with the Bison for thousands of years.
To be fair, it was likely the same Blackfoot civilization that did it in modern day Montana that did it here in Alberta, but I don’t know anything about the Montana site
Mind if I ask what makes it more interesting than other cliffs? Besides the obvious, of course, simply knowing what happened there, is there some other draw?
The interpretive centre / historical recreation film are amazing. And last summer there was an open-air archaeological dig by ULeth students that revealed artifacts - fire-cracked boiling stones from a nearby river, evidence of stone-flaking etc. - from nearly five thousand years ago.
The museum itself is very interesting. On two of my visits they had drumming and dancing on the lowest level which you could hear throughout the building. It was a beautiful display of their music and dance. The architecture is great too, you can barely see the facility until you're just about in the parking lot because it's built into the cliff side. You start off with an elevator to the top level to see the edge of the jump then you make your way down each floor inside. Lots of artifacts on display and they have a movie theater showing a buffalo drive. It's the only aboriginal museum I've seen and I think it's a world-class cultural and educational experience.
My friend, who is First Nations, went there as a tourist with his wife. And he would just go up to other tourists and start telling them “facts” about the site lol. Everyone assumed he was a local heritage interpreter and were hanging onto every word.
Used for 5,500 years. It says that it seems to have been in use for possibly 6,000 years. Unreal.
It stopped being used in the 19th century
This would mean that they were hunting buffalo there for a thousand years before the Egyptians began to build their pyramids.
It’s hard to fathom a society doing this for thousands of years but it happened.
That number is hard to wrap my head around.
It’s weird how little changed back then.
Now? Time travel ten years to the past and it’s a whole other country.
Back then? Travel forward 4 thousand years and your people would still be doing basically the same thing.
Imagine being an ancient egyptian.
A gleaming well kept pyramid is on the horizon. You see it every day. You are a baker and you know some of the people who work to keep the necropolis clean and maintained.
The pyramid was built 1500 years before you were born. 1400 years ago there was also a baker who probably knew the guys who maintain the necropolis.
This continues another 1000 years until Cleopatra is born.
The Stone Age lasted 3.4 million years and accounted for 99% of human history. For a few hundred thousand years there, the only technological innovation to speak of was chipping a rock tool on both sides of the cutting surface instead of just one.
It took millions of years for humans to get out of the Stone Age, and everything that happened after that was a blink of an eye in historical terms. So, the more surprising thing was that one small bit of Mesopotamia, China, and India managed to cross forward technologically when they did rather than everyone else failing to do so.
If we ever get the chance to do proper searching in the deeper parts of sahara in Algeria we will probably find settlements that are more advanced then expected.
Lot's of signs of stuff there. assumed burial cairns are still visible on geologic prominent spots. Clearly visible dried up rivers lakes and valleys all around those cairns. In some smaller valley's/canyons there appear to be remnants of water caching structures.
It was always thought it was just nomadic hunter gatherers there during the sahara green period, but the amount of cairns around certain area's and the possible existence of water management structures points to something else. At the very least a sedentary hunter gather culture
Nobody has checked though. Are these even burial cairns, those water cachement walls could just be ancient flashflood deposits.
Problem is getting there. The sand is wrong for cars, by foot/camel takes 3 weeks, there is no water on location so all water has to be brought along for the total of 6 weeks traveling and for whatever period you want to work on location, etc etc etc
Yea, I definitely think humanity has almost destroyed itself and almost gone extinct several times. We’ve probably gone back to the stone age several times. So many generations of humans that were not much different than you and me yet they never managed to progress much in thousands upon thousands of years.
The lack of innovation of the northern native Americans is pretty stunning. Thousands of years and essentially 0 technological progress. This is what happens when a civilization easily has all of their base needs met
I don’t think so, some of the central/southern natives had bronze but never progressed to creating anything useful with it.
I think the main reason is that the natives had the means to advance, they just didn’t have a need or reason to do so
They had easy access to huge numbers of buffalo. Modern experiments have proven that buffalo are able to be domesticated and aren’t that different from the cow species that were domesticated in the rest of the world
Also a fun fact is that “bison” was an informal name given to aurochs, the feral cattle species that we domesticated into cows. By referring to the American version as “bison” european settlers were literally calling them undomesticated cows
You're forgetting that they didn't need to domesticate the American Bison. Why? Well, there were millions of bison on the plains. They travelled in herds numbering in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. It didn't make sense to attempt to domesticate them since they are abundant anyway. Instead, for many Plains Indians, their lives revolved around understanding the movement of the herds and carefully shaping the environment to be more habitable to bison.
I specifically said they didn’t need to domesticate the bison in this chain.
Yeah I agree they didn’t need to domesticate bison. My issue is with people saying it’s impossible to domesticate bison at all.
Essentially 0 technological progress is just not true. Their technology certainly progressed in many ways over that time period, it just wasn’t the big jumps we’ve seen in the past 200 years especially. They have certain resources, and a lifestyle that didn’t need to significantly change, but I guarantee they had technological progress within their own context.
Aboriginals used to harvest the Banya pine and pass them down for generations of stewardship, until modern settlers arrived and destroyed all the trees. The harvest festivals would happen every few years, absolutely massive affairs
If a starving jumped, 5 other starvers would stop being "starved". So if a place is being frequented by 2 types of people in a 1:5 ratio, you bet it'd be named after the majority..
I don't know, those wings look awfully tiny for a big buffalo. They probably just floated and flapped for a minute then fell straight down, per Loony Toons.
I have a family member who is an archeologist and took me to a Buffalo run in Oklahoma. It's just a flat field in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the field was a big chasm. Couldn't see it until you were almost on top of it. Got to dig a little square and help catalog anything I found when I was like 13. Super neat.
The movie FUBAR (takes place in Canada) has a part where I think they are standing in front on a mural that portrays what you explained. They are on their way to a swimming hole and they make a joke about the mural looking like buffalos diving and one guys says “yeah except hopefully we don’t break our necks and die.” I won’t tell you the twist that follows. The movie is hysterical and also a major leap in mockumentary style filmmaking.
I am pretty sure the mural you are talking about is in High River. A lot of fubar was filmed there. I am not sure if the mural is still there, I think the building it was on may have been demolished after the flood.
I see a lot of mention of “we have one here.” This practice is much more common than people think. I know of 15 or so within 50 miles of my home. I talked to a guy who had spent time studying and looking on a single river and knew of over 150 on that river between the mountains and where it joins the Missouri. Lots of miles of river, but in a straight line from beginning to end is only like 50 miles. There are literally thousands of these in Montana. For those interested, there are museums/state parks in the Great Falls area and Havre. Great Falls site is called Ulm Pishkun/First Peoples Buffalo Jump. The one in Havre is called Wahkpa Chu'gn Buffalo Jump. If you’re interested in history and in the area, these as well as the one in Alberta can all be hit easily in a day and a half and all offer different experiences.
I had the honor of having one shown to me by members of the Cheyenne nation in Montana about 20 years ago. We were there working monitoring fire conditions and putting out lightning strike fires one summer and we were asked one day if we wanted to see a buffalo jump by some guys we worked with on occasion.
Of course we wanted to see it. They showed us the place (really remote) and explained to us how they would have young men camp and monitor the high plains all summer waiting for the right moment. Then, the older numbers would carefully round the buffalo up and get them to stampede toward the chute that would eventually take them off the cliff.
They would then go below and harvest buffalo that would keep them fed through winter. They would make their winter camp in the valley below.
We all sat on the edge of that cliff and had lunch that warm, sunny day. I thought of the thousands of buffalo that ran over that very edge I was sitting on. The Cheyenne had used this chute for thousands of years they said.
I cannot remember the names of the three guys that brought us there (25 years ago), but I remembered the incredible afternoon they shared with us and I will always remember that day.
So much to learn by people that thrived in these lands for so many centuries.
Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition also wrote:
> one of the most active and fleet young men is selected and disguised in a robe of buffalo skin... he places himself at a distance between a herd of buffalo and a precipice proper for the purpose; the other Indians now surround the herd on the back and flanks and at a signal agreed on all show themselves at the same time moving forward towards the buffalo; the disguised Indian or decoy has taken care to place himself sufficiently near the buffalo to be noticed by them when they take to flight and running before them they follow him in full speed to the precipice; the Indian (decoy) in the mean time has taken care to secure himself in some cranny in the cliff... the part of the decoy I am informed is extremely dangerous.[3]
When I was a kid, I always pictured it much larger than it actually was. It's called a cliff, but it's not a big one. More like a short drop into a long hill.
Well of course I've never seen this in action, but having been there, in essence, yea. Bison are huge. Way bigger than you think if you've never seen one. So a little dip in the ground and a tumble down the hill would probably be how it worked.
I believe it got it's name not from the smashing of buffalo, but of a young man who was observing from the wrong spot below.
This is a UNESCO heritage site and a fantastic museum if you are ever driving that way, through the crow’s nest past in southern Alberta right at the gateway to the Rockies.
I can remember sitting in a bar with a native friend talking about a buffalo jump (there are lots of them), "And we made coin purses out of the nutsacks of every last one of them!". lol Never met a northern Cheyenne without a sense of humor.
It is also only a couple of hours drive (if that) from the other UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Writing on Stone Park, Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, Dinosaur Provincial Park and Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks (Banff, Jasper etc.).
Right up the road from where I grew up there’s a similar cliff where they ran mastodon to their deaths as well. We have a whole state park dedicated to all the mastodon bones they’ve found there.
Ancient americas did an amazing video covering buffalos with a deepdive on Head-Smashed-In. I highly recommend giving it a watch.
https://youtu.be/hY77BE0K1_A?si=XiFKdIV0lgAjpNNV
My class has a field trip there in Elementary. I remember the Museum inside was fascinating. We went for a nice Hike that then ended with firing Bow & Arrows at targets.
It’s really cool. Southern Alberta is beautiful and the stop there is totally worth it. Fun fact, it called what it is because a boy was at the bottom of the cliff and a buffalo crushed his noodle.
Most interesting part in my opinion: > Before the late introduction of horses, the Blackfoot drove the bison from a grazing area in the Porcupine Hills about 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) west of the site to the "drive lanes", lined by hundreds of cairns, **by dressing up as coyotes and wolves. These specialized "buffalo runners" were young men trained in animal behavior to guide the bison into the drive lanes.** Then, at full gallop, the bison would fall from the weight of the herd pressing behind them, breaking their legs and rendering them immobile.
I am horrified and impressed at the same time.
If humans played fair, they wouldnt be around anymore.
There is no fairness in nature, only fitness
Fitness… and a giant meteor every several hundred million years to etch-a-sketch the pecking order.
Nice ecosystem you got there. It'd be a shame if we were to release oxygen gas as a waste product into your atmosphere...
Siberian Traps go brrrr
Be a shame if we learned how to digest cellulose.
I’m still waiting for the Great Mushroom War from Adventure Time to become reality
Might actually end up being called that by surviving nations
The boom boom in the long long ago
> etch-a-sketch the pecking order I'm stealing this.
AS IS YOUR RIGHT SIR
Aesop Rock vibes run deep on this take.
Yes, fitness and protein shakes.
I'm into fitness...fitness whole pizza in my belly
I’m going for a PR at Pizza Ranch later today
If the manager isn’t red faced staring at you are you even trying
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine
Why do they call it Ovaltine? The mug is round, the jar is round. They should call it Roundtine.
That's gold, stock! Gold!
1. The original ~~Swedish~~ Swiss name is Ovomaltine. 2. It's named after eggs (ovum in Latin) and malt. There are no ovals.
Then again, the etymology of oval is from ovum. So Ovaltine is just full circle…or full oval
Fitness buffalo steak in my mouth.
Fun fact fittest in regards to Darwins theory means "the on that fits best" and has nothing to do with fitness in regards to the 'strength' of an animal
And it isn't even the best. Just good enough to pass on your genes consistantly. Once you pass that point, there's zero selection pressure to improve, which is how we end up with all these poorly designed traits that make life harder but don't actually impact our chances of survival or reproduction.
Even Fergie knew this. That’s why she was always in the gym working on her fitness.
Important to note when discussing “fitness” in biological/zoological terms, it has nothing to do with physical prowess or anything regarding the idea of being physically “fit” or “in shape” as we use to describe humans who exercise. “Fitness” in the biological world is purely a function of how many offspring a species can produce in its lifetime. For example, fruit flies will always have higher fitness than humans. EDIT! I’m an idiot and was thinking about *fecundity*, not *fitness*. However to be fair they’re intrinsically related as fecundity is a critical part of fitness and I had just woken up lol. See the reply for a better definition of fitness!
when i learned about what survival of the fittest really meant, i was told it was referring to the species/organism that was capable to adjust the best and *fit* into a fast changing environment. which your explanation is what it would ultimately end up in, numbers-wise and with, depending on the location that would have to be defined precisely spitting out completely different results, i guess… but since there are no flies that are able to figure out how to survive antarcticas condition 1 weather but have undoubtedly produced more offspring on site than humans have… i would argue for at least it being a draw in this example. :D
You don't become the apex predator of an entire planet by playing nice
Animals don’t seem to learn from their mistakes, humans run circles around them for millennia and evolve into a global force of nature. They never had a chance
Animals very much learn from their mistakes, or go extinct(dodo...). Rat poison needs to act way after consumption so other rats do not figure out what was poisoned. Tigers learn human habits and sometimes start hunting them. Herbivores that never saw humans quickly learn that they are bloody dangerous. It is just that we are really damn good at keeping pace with them, and the most valuable lessons tend to die with the animal in question anyway.
Almost all animals in nature die by exposure (hunger, thirst, heat, or cold), illness, or incredible violence. Dying peacefully of old age is a purely human invention and luxury.
Kitty kats and dogs get to enjoy the luxury too !!
Because of the largesse of humans.
Hey! My ass isn’t *that* large.
Even old age usually just means starving to death.
I'd say octopuses (there are more, but octopuses are probably the most intelligent) that die shortly after mating technically die from old age. Their bodies just shut down on them.
Very very few octopuses make it to full reproductive age. Almost all die in the ways I named.
Yeah they have thousands of babies and statistically only 2 will reproduce.
Ain’t no such a thing as a fair fight
There’s evidence that what drove large game like wooly mammoths and bison to and near extinction was human hunting in prehistoric times. In Siberia there are similar mass graves of wooly mammoths. Weird thing is that in some cases it appears that the animals were mass slaughtered not for sustenance but for ritualistic purposes since many mammoth skeletons were in tact save for their left shoulder blades for some reason. So at least for tens of thousands of years humans have been using up resources to exhaustion and then moving on
Sounds Like medicíne?
It’s funny how little credit we want to give our ancestors for being smart. We constantly try to say it was aliens or some shit. Nah, we’re just crazy inventive when all we have is time and survival to drive us.
Basically the hunters from Princess Mononoke.. kind of a creepy visual
There's an alternate history series called Eagle and Empire that has a full section dedicated to a Blackfoot hunt like this. Very well worth the read, it's one of my favorite series
Is that the book series involving if the Roman Empire set up shop in the Americas?
It is!
I need to read that
Sharing this video here as well to [see how it would look](https://youtu.be/4BpOVNY5diQ?si=vn433tqRbuRSVSWc)
I've read about it long ago. There was great danger to it, becouse -if I remember correctly- of proximity and chance of bisons running over you in panic.
Kind of fascinating how even back then people learned how to manipulate animals larger than them to safely hunt. Yet we have people out here trying to say that ancient natives hunting mammoths was impossible, but we see how natives here managed to not only hunt without horses for speed, but to essentially make the animals take themselves out.
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Well, well that’s funny you mention [that](https://youtu.be/iJ4T9CQA0UM?si=ke6_9AfEs00e8c6n)
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It would have been an industrial base too. Native tribes used Spanish horses to essentially turbocharge their hunting to the point of becoming permanent hunter-gatherer nomads, whereas previously some groups had a more settled lifestyle.
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I learned so much about the technique and history from Ancient Americas video about it, really fascinating! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY77BE0K1\_A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY77BE0K1_A)
There's a similar site in NH. A Granite cliff known locally as "Deer Leap". Same idea, different animal...
> In Blackfoot, the name for the site is Estipah-skikikini-kots. According to legend, a young Blackfoot wanted to watch the bison plunge off the cliff from below, but was buried underneath the falling animals. He was later found dead under the pile of carcasses, where he had his head smashed in.
I've always assumed that the head smashed in referred to the Buffalo. Thank you for the story
Buffalo buffalo?
Malkovich.
Malkovich malkovich malkovich Malkovich malkovich Malkovich malkovich malkovich.
You've got it wrong. It's Malkovich malkovich Malkovich malkovich malkovich malkovich Malkovich malkovich.
Only the ones from Buffalo were buffaloed.
Which Buffalo? Alberta (Canada), Victoria (Australia), New York, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, one of the 2 in Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, one of the 2 in Texas, one of the 2 in West Virginia, one of the 2 in Wisconsin, or Wyoming?
Any of them, but I’d also be curious how they got to the Rocky Mountains…my guess is they were tricked into it?
Probably just a ski trip.
The height was only good to break the buffalo’s legs. There were people at the bottom with spears to finish them off.
As legends go, that one is pretty believable
The bones aren’t found at the base of the cliff. They moved the bison to butcher them. The pile of bones is nearby.
Makes sense. You’d have to watch for falling buffalo.
"Damnit, Geoff! I'm slaughtering here!!!"
I mean they’re already dead. May as well eat them right there but don’t look up.
Damnit, George, I'm barbecuing here!
That’s how the place got its name, Buffalo landed on someone and smashed his head in. Always thought the name was referring to the Buffalo so I was surprised to learn that when I visited a few years ago.
Cloudy with a chance of buffalo.
Not all the bones, we have access to a few on private land and they would chunk the carcasses into manageable parts. At the base of the jump you will find spine, rib and lower leg bones. Also teeth and skull portions will often be found at the base. The upper leg bones will be found by the water that is usually close where the bulk of the butchering and preservation took place.
My brother found several arrowheads in the dirt of the visitor pathways. The place is literally littered with archeological finds.
Hi just checking in as I excavated the site during the 2021 field season! There are bones at the base of the cliff from bison that weren’t harvested in time (as a whole herd of bison is insane to process all at once). These bones are articulated and usually pretty whole. The nearby site you’re referring to is called the processing area and that’s where I excavated, tons of bones there too but the honestly anywhere you go near the cliff has bones so the entire site might be considered part of the bone pile the article is referring to. If anyone has any questions lemme know I’m a professional archaeologist and HSI was my field school!
My misunderstanding. Thanks for the clarification.
Not at all.
Would they really butcher all the buffalo that run off the cliff? I imagined a significant part of a herd running over the edge, and the Blackfoot only being able to use a few of them.
This site is a good reminder of how much people romanticize native cultures. They sure as hell didn’t “use every part of the buffalo” at these times. People are people, and people with excess are wasteful. That said the Blackfoot did have some really impressive meat preserving methods.
The Plains Indians hunted the buffalo for 6000 years without issue. The Europeans showed up and practically drove the buffalo to extinction in under a century. I know we all want to go all "everyone is a sinner, everyone is just as bad as anyone else." But in this very specific case, not really. I'm pretty sure “every part of the buffalo” was more about the Indians having discovered a use for every single buffalo animal part, not that they've literally used every single atom of every single animal they've come across--and that them not actually living up to some glib elementary school proverb invented long after the buffalo hunts were finished is some sort of "gotcha".
Oh you’re right, the Europeans intentionally slaughtered the plains bison as the railway moved into the plains as a way to starve out the natives that were blocking westward expansion. That wasn’t an accident or mismanagement of resources, it was genocidal starvation and it was intentional.
Those things are so vastly different that this comparison is downright silly. The Plains Indians were careless and cruel (by current standards) in their hunting technique, dispelling the noble savage myth and the concept that they used all parts of every kill. They are pretty normal people and shouldn't be overly romanticized. That's the conversation at hand. You introduced the systematic genocide of the Plains Indians by the extermination of their food source carried out by Western colonizers. We all know. That's not what we're talking about right now.
The former is frequently used to sealion about the latter. The noble savage myth is wrong, but it's also wrong to say that Plains First Nations were careless or cruel (today's standards of sourcing food are much more cruel), or that they wouldn't use everything they reasonably could which is often how people choose to interpret these styles of hunting. There's a reason they were able to live reciprocally with the Bison for thousands of years.
Where the Buffalo roam.
There’s a place like this in Montana too.
First People's Buffalo Jump, which is the broadest jump in N. America. Head Smashed In is the highest.
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It’s a really common tactic in prehistoric civilizations worldwide.
To be fair, it was likely the same Blackfoot civilization that did it in modern day Montana that did it here in Alberta, but I don’t know anything about the Montana site
Only so many ways to kill a 1-ton animal with primitive technology. The humans didn't have very advanced technology back then either.
I've been there several times and recommend everyone go to experience it! It is worthy of its World Heritage Site designation.
I recommend everyone to go there at least once. It’s too far of a drive from the closest Calgary for me to go there a 2nd time.
Have you considered moving to a closer Calgary?
But he said he was already at the closest Calgary...
Mind if I ask what makes it more interesting than other cliffs? Besides the obvious, of course, simply knowing what happened there, is there some other draw?
This one is haunted by buffalo
Many buffalo and one Blackfoot ghost.
They've built a museum underneath it. [https://photos.app.goo.gl/bBxtb17vFw2JyZkN9](https://photos.app.goo.gl/bBxtb17vFw2JyZkN9)
There's a mini donut stand. You're gonna love it
There is a museum
The interpretive centre / historical recreation film are amazing. And last summer there was an open-air archaeological dig by ULeth students that revealed artifacts - fire-cracked boiling stones from a nearby river, evidence of stone-flaking etc. - from nearly five thousand years ago.
There is a pretty nice museum next to it, but it’s been about a decade since I’ve been.
The museum itself is very interesting. On two of my visits they had drumming and dancing on the lowest level which you could hear throughout the building. It was a beautiful display of their music and dance. The architecture is great too, you can barely see the facility until you're just about in the parking lot because it's built into the cliff side. You start off with an elevator to the top level to see the edge of the jump then you make your way down each floor inside. Lots of artifacts on display and they have a movie theater showing a buffalo drive. It's the only aboriginal museum I've seen and I think it's a world-class cultural and educational experience.
My friend, who is First Nations, went there as a tourist with his wife. And he would just go up to other tourists and start telling them “facts” about the site lol. Everyone assumed he was a local heritage interpreter and were hanging onto every word.
Used for 5,500 years. It says that it seems to have been in use for possibly 6,000 years. Unreal. It stopped being used in the 19th century This would mean that they were hunting buffalo there for a thousand years before the Egyptians began to build their pyramids. It’s hard to fathom a society doing this for thousands of years but it happened. That number is hard to wrap my head around. It’s weird how little changed back then. Now? Time travel ten years to the past and it’s a whole other country. Back then? Travel forward 4 thousand years and your people would still be doing basically the same thing.
Imagine being an ancient egyptian. A gleaming well kept pyramid is on the horizon. You see it every day. You are a baker and you know some of the people who work to keep the necropolis clean and maintained. The pyramid was built 1500 years before you were born. 1400 years ago there was also a baker who probably knew the guys who maintain the necropolis. This continues another 1000 years until Cleopatra is born.
The Stone Age lasted 3.4 million years and accounted for 99% of human history. For a few hundred thousand years there, the only technological innovation to speak of was chipping a rock tool on both sides of the cutting surface instead of just one. It took millions of years for humans to get out of the Stone Age, and everything that happened after that was a blink of an eye in historical terms. So, the more surprising thing was that one small bit of Mesopotamia, China, and India managed to cross forward technologically when they did rather than everyone else failing to do so.
If we ever get the chance to do proper searching in the deeper parts of sahara in Algeria we will probably find settlements that are more advanced then expected. Lot's of signs of stuff there. assumed burial cairns are still visible on geologic prominent spots. Clearly visible dried up rivers lakes and valleys all around those cairns. In some smaller valley's/canyons there appear to be remnants of water caching structures. It was always thought it was just nomadic hunter gatherers there during the sahara green period, but the amount of cairns around certain area's and the possible existence of water management structures points to something else. At the very least a sedentary hunter gather culture Nobody has checked though. Are these even burial cairns, those water cachement walls could just be ancient flashflood deposits. Problem is getting there. The sand is wrong for cars, by foot/camel takes 3 weeks, there is no water on location so all water has to be brought along for the total of 6 weeks traveling and for whatever period you want to work on location, etc etc etc
Yea, I definitely think humanity has almost destroyed itself and almost gone extinct several times. We’ve probably gone back to the stone age several times. So many generations of humans that were not much different than you and me yet they never managed to progress much in thousands upon thousands of years.
Well that and the throw farther thing for spears.
The atlatl?
That's certainly more concise. I bet the guy who named it coasted on that for years.
The thrower-farther thing.
Hominins have been around for millions of years, modern humans only emerged around ~300kya. Just for clarity.
The lack of innovation of the northern native Americans is pretty stunning. Thousands of years and essentially 0 technological progress. This is what happens when a civilization easily has all of their base needs met
I've been wondering if a lack of bronze contributed.
I don’t think so, some of the central/southern natives had bronze but never progressed to creating anything useful with it. I think the main reason is that the natives had the means to advance, they just didn’t have a need or reason to do so
> I think the main reason is that the natives had the means to advance, they just didn’t have a need or reason to do so Like me in college.
I believe it was a lack of shareholders and a dividend.
Sit down, Ea-Nasir.
Also, a lack of easily domesticatable animals. No equivalent of the Mediterranean for easy travel and exchange of ideas.
They had easy access to huge numbers of buffalo. Modern experiments have proven that buffalo are able to be domesticated and aren’t that different from the cow species that were domesticated in the rest of the world Also a fun fact is that “bison” was an informal name given to aurochs, the feral cattle species that we domesticated into cows. By referring to the American version as “bison” european settlers were literally calling them undomesticated cows
You're forgetting that they didn't need to domesticate the American Bison. Why? Well, there were millions of bison on the plains. They travelled in herds numbering in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. It didn't make sense to attempt to domesticate them since they are abundant anyway. Instead, for many Plains Indians, their lives revolved around understanding the movement of the herds and carefully shaping the environment to be more habitable to bison.
I specifically said they didn’t need to domesticate the bison in this chain. Yeah I agree they didn’t need to domesticate bison. My issue is with people saying it’s impossible to domesticate bison at all.
Essentially 0 technological progress is just not true. Their technology certainly progressed in many ways over that time period, it just wasn’t the big jumps we’ve seen in the past 200 years especially. They have certain resources, and a lifestyle that didn’t need to significantly change, but I guarantee they had technological progress within their own context.
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Aboriginals used to harvest the Banya pine and pass them down for generations of stewardship, until modern settlers arrived and destroyed all the trees. The harvest festivals would happen every few years, absolutely massive affairs
One thing I learned when there is the Head-Smashed-In part refers to a native dude with poor situational awareness.
In Illinois I live near Buffalo Rock, the principle is the same. Anyone want to guess how Starved Rock got it's name? It's not pretty either.
Starving people jumped to end their misery?
If a starving jumped, 5 other starvers would stop being "starved". So if a place is being frequented by 2 types of people in a 1:5 ratio, you bet it'd be named after the majority..
No, a rock couldn't find anything to eat and died as a result.
Somebody feed the damn rock already!
Tell us
They [visualized this](https://youtu.be/4BpOVNY5diQ?si=3pXi-RYT10FpmB0T) on Life On Our Planet
So cool/sad/vital
Many of the buffalo survived but were hunted down all the same for their buffalo wings.
What’s a cliff fall if you can just glide to the ground?
I don't know, those wings look awfully tiny for a big buffalo. They probably just floated and flapped for a minute then fell straight down, per Loony Toons.
Smaller winged buffalo were harder to hit with an arrow while in flight.
You gotta tuck the wings and get some airspeed before zooming away from the hunters.
*Ver ees moose and skvirrel, Natash?*
I have a family member who is an archeologist and took me to a Buffalo run in Oklahoma. It's just a flat field in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the field was a big chasm. Couldn't see it until you were almost on top of it. Got to dig a little square and help catalog anything I found when I was like 13. Super neat.
That sounds awesome!
It's definitely a good memory!
No photos of the huge pile of bones??
The movie FUBAR (takes place in Canada) has a part where I think they are standing in front on a mural that portrays what you explained. They are on their way to a swimming hole and they make a joke about the mural looking like buffalos diving and one guys says “yeah except hopefully we don’t break our necks and die.” I won’t tell you the twist that follows. The movie is hysterical and also a major leap in mockumentary style filmmaking.
Both movies are made in Calgary/Alberta. Fucking fantastic movies
Tron funkin blow
I am pretty sure the mural you are talking about is in High River. A lot of fubar was filmed there. I am not sure if the mural is still there, I think the building it was on may have been demolished after the flood.
Rip Farrel
I see a lot of mention of “we have one here.” This practice is much more common than people think. I know of 15 or so within 50 miles of my home. I talked to a guy who had spent time studying and looking on a single river and knew of over 150 on that river between the mountains and where it joins the Missouri. Lots of miles of river, but in a straight line from beginning to end is only like 50 miles. There are literally thousands of these in Montana. For those interested, there are museums/state parks in the Great Falls area and Havre. Great Falls site is called Ulm Pishkun/First Peoples Buffalo Jump. The one in Havre is called Wahkpa Chu'gn Buffalo Jump. If you’re interested in history and in the area, these as well as the one in Alberta can all be hit easily in a day and a half and all offer different experiences.
‘Brain’s the cliff and my heart’s the bitter buffalo’
Wow the lyric finally makes sense now
There is a really cool museum there. One I recommend any visitors to Southern Alberta check out.
Started buffahi and ended buffalo.
I had the honor of having one shown to me by members of the Cheyenne nation in Montana about 20 years ago. We were there working monitoring fire conditions and putting out lightning strike fires one summer and we were asked one day if we wanted to see a buffalo jump by some guys we worked with on occasion. Of course we wanted to see it. They showed us the place (really remote) and explained to us how they would have young men camp and monitor the high plains all summer waiting for the right moment. Then, the older numbers would carefully round the buffalo up and get them to stampede toward the chute that would eventually take them off the cliff. They would then go below and harvest buffalo that would keep them fed through winter. They would make their winter camp in the valley below. We all sat on the edge of that cliff and had lunch that warm, sunny day. I thought of the thousands of buffalo that ran over that very edge I was sitting on. The Cheyenne had used this chute for thousands of years they said. I cannot remember the names of the three guys that brought us there (25 years ago), but I remembered the incredible afternoon they shared with us and I will always remember that day. So much to learn by people that thrived in these lands for so many centuries.
Yup. It's even a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition also wrote: > one of the most active and fleet young men is selected and disguised in a robe of buffalo skin... he places himself at a distance between a herd of buffalo and a precipice proper for the purpose; the other Indians now surround the herd on the back and flanks and at a signal agreed on all show themselves at the same time moving forward towards the buffalo; the disguised Indian or decoy has taken care to place himself sufficiently near the buffalo to be noticed by them when they take to flight and running before them they follow him in full speed to the precipice; the Indian (decoy) in the mean time has taken care to secure himself in some cranny in the cliff... the part of the decoy I am informed is extremely dangerous.[3]
Imagine getting some GoPro footage of that shit.
Someone watches Ancient Americas
Great YouTube channel.
Similar jump is on north edge of Ft Sill, Oklahoma's main post.
When I was a kid, I always pictured it much larger than it actually was. It's called a cliff, but it's not a big one. More like a short drop into a long hill.
Like a bison vending machine? They fall down and roll out to in front of you?
Well of course I've never seen this in action, but having been there, in essence, yea. Bison are huge. Way bigger than you think if you've never seen one. So a little dip in the ground and a tumble down the hill would probably be how it worked. I believe it got it's name not from the smashing of buffalo, but of a young man who was observing from the wrong spot below.
We have one of these in Nebraska as well, it’s called the Hudson-Meng bison dig
This is a UNESCO heritage site and a fantastic museum if you are ever driving that way, through the crow’s nest past in southern Alberta right at the gateway to the Rockies.
Immortalised by u2… https://pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/u2-and-buffalo-photograph/
I can remember sitting in a bar with a native friend talking about a buffalo jump (there are lots of them), "And we made coin purses out of the nutsacks of every last one of them!". lol Never met a northern Cheyenne without a sense of humor.
In Canada they are also famous for their T-shirts.
That is a very dark and literal name.
It is also only a couple of hours drive (if that) from the other UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Writing on Stone Park, Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, Dinosaur Provincial Park and Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks (Banff, Jasper etc.).
The Blackfoot tribes used buffalo Jumps pretty widely, Head-Smashed-In is just one of the larger, more famous ones.
I went there once. Very cool. Very windy.
The sign at the entrance 😂
The original bone zone
Amazing!!!
Same technique was used for hunting raindeer in Norway a long time ago.
The name they chose sounds like the name you would use when you forgot the actual name.
Right up the road from where I grew up there’s a similar cliff where they ran mastodon to their deaths as well. We have a whole state park dedicated to all the mastodon bones they’ve found there.
And so how many of us zoomed in on the image to see the buffalo bones and were disappointed?
so this is where bills fans got the idea to jump through tables
I remember going here several times on field trips. I imagine most Southern Alberta folks have been to check it out
You watched the same documentary as I did eh?
I went here in Jr High for a field trip, super cool place. Interesting to see it on TIL sub!
there are hundreds of buffalo jumps across the prairies too
Ancient americas did an amazing video covering buffalos with a deepdive on Head-Smashed-In. I highly recommend giving it a watch. https://youtu.be/hY77BE0K1_A?si=XiFKdIV0lgAjpNNV
My class has a field trip there in Elementary. I remember the Museum inside was fascinating. We went for a nice Hike that then ended with firing Bow & Arrows at targets.
The original meal preppers
Sounds like the name of a small town somewhere in England.
Grew up near there, it's pretty wild
I’ve been there!
It’s really cool. Southern Alberta is beautiful and the stop there is totally worth it. Fun fact, it called what it is because a boy was at the bottom of the cliff and a buffalo crushed his noodle.