{"id":2554,"date":"2010-01-14T12:35:21","date_gmt":"2010-01-14T20:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/?p=2554"},"modified":"2018-02-02T19:27:47","modified_gmt":"2018-02-02T19:27:47","slug":"nature-always-bats-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/01\/14\/nature-always-bats-last\/","title":{"rendered":"Nature Always Bats Last"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico Photo: Craig Miller<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mike Newland is an archeologist at Sonoma State University’s Anthropological Studies Center<\/a>.<\/em> A version of this essay was originally broadcast<\/a> as part of KQED’s <\/em>Perspectives<\/a> series. <\/em><\/p>\n

Nature Always Bats Last<\/p>\n

By Mike Newland<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been pondering a 3,000 year old mystery that makes me uneasy about our current plight. Starting around 2,000 B.C., people in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert really got into big-game hunting.\u00a0 We see this in the archaeological record\u2014all of this big-horn sheep and antelope bone shows up in larger quantities.\u00a0 Up in the mountains, great panels of rock art are chock full of hunters chasing sheep, and evidence of their hunting camps is tucked in shelters and around springs.<\/p>\n

Big-game hunting isn\u2019t that efficient.\u00a0 You\u2019re better off going for a wide range of edibles close by.\u00a0 You get more food for less work.\u00a0 This is an important point, because after 3,000 years of this big game hunting, this culture died out, and was replaced by folks that hunted and collected a broader range of food.<\/p>\n

Bill Hildebrandt and Kelly McGuire, two archaeologists from Far Western Anthropological Research Group in Davis, have made a compelling argument about why people were so obsessed with hunting\u2014they did it for status.<\/p>\n

Good hunters were revered for their abilities to provide food and hunting trips could serve political and social functions.\u00a0 But big game hunting was eventually done at the expense of the rest of the population: archaeologists still discuss whether the bow and arrow, probably introduced to California by groups coming out of Oregon, was such an effective hunting tool that the hunters wiped-out most of the big game, or whether the devastating effects of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, which caused major droughts throughout the Great Basin and desert areas, pushed these people over the edge.\u00a0 But it is clear that serious changes took place, and big game hunting became unsustainable.\u00a0 By the time the next group of folks came along, the big-game hunters were on the verge of collapse.<\/p>\n

This is one of the reasons why archaeology is important\u2014we can look at past cultures and see how we, as a species, have dealt with big problems.<\/p>\n

This research makes me uneasy because archaeology has shown repeatedly that cultures not in balance with nature die out.\u00a0 For millennia, people have sat around campfires debating whether to make the changes necessary to adapt to a shifting climate or depleted resource base, and invariably they said no. As a result, the graveyards of history are full of the corpses of cultures that failed to change when they needed to.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s our turn. History shows that nature won\u2019t hesitate to take us out.\u00a0 We\u2019re lucky in that we have probably one of the most adaptive cultures in history: we\u2019ve made major changes\u2014abolition of slavery, passing of environmental legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment\u2014when we thought it was in our collective best interest. Even still, these landmark changes required decades of hard work and dedication to educate the broader population.\u00a0 We have our work cut out for us.\u00a0 We can either rise to the occasion, and make the investments necessary to stem climate change, or we can take our place with the rest of the dead in the graveyard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For millennia, people have sat around campfires debating whether to make the changes necessary to adapt to a shifting climate or depleted resource base, and invariably they said no. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[181,646],"coauthors":[],"series":[],"affiliates":[],"programs":[],"collections":[],"interests":[],"class_list":["post-2554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thescience","tag-ecosystems","tag-beliefs"],"acf":{"template_type":"standard","featured_image_type":"standard","is_audio_post":false},"yoast_head":"\nNature Always Bats Last | Climate Watch<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/01\/14\/nature-always-bats-last\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nature Always Bats Last | Climate Watch\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For millennia, people have sat around campfires debating whether to make the changes necessary to adapt to a shifting climate or depleted resource base, and invariably they said no.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/01\/14\/nature-always-bats-last\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Climate Watch\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-01-14T20:35:21+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-02-02T19:27:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/54\/2010\/01\/Bandolier-800x600.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Craig Miller\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@voxterra\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Craig Miller\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/01\/14\/nature-always-bats-last\/\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/01\/14\/nature-always-bats-last\/\",\"name\":\"Nature Always Bats Last | Climate Watch\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2010-01-14T20:35:21+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-02-02T19:27:47+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/#\/schema\/person\/f7222c517400a6c4b0336fca3652c323\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/01\/14\/nature-always-bats-last\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"http:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/01\/14\/nature-always-bats-last\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2010\/01\/14\/nature-always-bats-last\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Nature Always Bats Last\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/\",\"name\":\"Climate Watch\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/#\/schema\/person\/f7222c517400a6c4b0336fca3652c323\",\"name\":\"Craig Miller\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/dd8f4f4f978df3faac9db4c510939ea0\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/b91661df645e001a9cafe0861fa685f9?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/b91661df645e001a9cafe0861fa685f9?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Craig Miller\"},\"description\":\"Craig is a former KQED Science editor, specializing in weather, climate, water & energy issues, with a little seismology thrown in just to shake things up. 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