Neanderthals

Homo neanderthalensis emerged about 200,000 years ago as a regional species or ecotype of Homo heidelbergensis in Europe. A parallel species, Homo sapiens, was developing at the same time in east Africa. Neanderthals evolved into thee subgroups: one in Asia (blue on the map below), one in northern Europe (pink), and one in southern (rust). The boundary between east and west lay in the Caucasus. The last two were divided by the Alps, which were covered at times with glaciers during the Pleistocene.

Anders Götherström’s team found differences between the eastern and western groups increased about 48,000 years ago. The DNA from bones found before that period and those found in the east contained the range of genetic variation one would expect. Those from the west showed much less: .0063 compared with an index of .0191 for eastern Neanderthals and .0270 for species in Africa.

The reduced variation recorded a demographic crisis that occurred when the western population had been severely reduced in size and regrown from a single group or area. Thomas Schmitt has noted that when species expanded from Pleistocene refuges they exhibit "only weak genetic differentiation during the process of range expansion."

Götherström’s group noted the break in Neanderthal genetic continuity occurred after ice bergs breaking from the Greenland ice sheet added cold, fresh water to the north Atlantic. The altered ocean currents brought frigid conditions to western Europe.

Hartmut Heinrich was the one who first observed the changes in ocean core sediments that occurred when ice bergs calved. The fifth such episode has been dated to 50,000 years ago by Gerald Bond’s team. Mark Maslin’s group thought the rafting was fairly rapid and each episode probably lasted less than a thousand years. That’s still 50 generations that reproduce every 20 years.

Quick change is difficult for plants, animals, and their dependants. Götherström’s colleagues hypothesized the western Neanderthals that survived were those who moved into protected refuges from which they emerged when climatic conditions improved.

During the ice age, there were three major European protected areas for species fleeing the spreading glaciers: the Iberian, Italian and Balkan peninsulas (the R's on the map below). Schmitt has reviewed their ranges, which include small mammals, insects, and plants. Within the Spanish peninsula, he noted one nursery area was in the southwest. The other in the southeast had some connections to the maghreb of northern Africa. The refuges roughly coincide with the distribution of southern Neanderthals.

Notes:
Bond, Gerard, et alia. "Correlations Between Climate Records from North Atlantic Sediments and Greenland Ice," Nature 365:143-147:1993; date for Heinrich event 5.

Fabre, Virginie, Silvana Condemi, and Anna Degioanni. "Genetic Evidence of Geographical Groups among Neanderthals," PLoS One, 15 April 15, 2009.

Götherström, Anders, Thomas P. Gilbert, J. Carlos Díez Fernández-Lomana, Eske Willerslev, and Juan Luis Arsuaga. "Partial Genetic Turnover in Neandertals: Continuity in the East and Population Replacement in the West," Molecular Biology and Evolution 29:1893-1897:2012.

Heinrich, H. "Origin and Consequences of Cyclic Ice Rafting in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean During the past 130,000 Years," Quaternary Research 29:142-152:1988; cited by Wikipedia. The episodes are referred to as Heinrich Events 5 and 6.

Schmitt, Thomas. "Molecular Biogeography of Europe: Pleistocene Cycles and Postglacial Trends," Frontiers in Zoology, 2007.

Graphics:
1. Delamaison, Manon. "Distribution Géographique des Sites du Moustérien," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 15 October 2013.

2. Neanderthal subgroups, from Fabre, above. Pink represents the range of western Neanderthals, blue the east, and gold the southern.

3. Pleistocene refuges, from Schmitt, above. The R’s represent refugia, the H’s diffusion paths for recolonization.

Experiences of Fire

Chemistry dictates there’s only one way to create a fire: heat a carbon containing substance to 400C.

Nature does it by charging electrons until they’re hot enough to flare in bolts of lightning. Such events were more likely to occur in prehistoric Africa than in Europe. Today, the greatest number of cloud to ground strokes occur in the highlands of eastern Congo, the black spot on the map below that lies on the equator.

NASA’s charting shows Europe experiences relatively few lightning strokes. Our part of the country gets a moderate number, but only one of our recent fires was caused by lightening. The Jaroso ran through the headwaters of the Santa Cruz river near Trailrider Wall in 2013.

The other major fires were caused by exposing flammable material to intense heat. The Dome spread from a poorly extinguished camp fire in 1996, the Cerro Grande from a controlled burn in 2000, and Las Conchas from a downed power line in 2011. All occurred during times of high winds, and none were declared out until monsoon rains had drenched them.

In the past, the easiest way to create such a spark was by striking pyrite with something harder like chert or flint. The impact sheered the iron and ignited the sulphur. Pyrite is iron sulfide (FeS₂), flint and chert mainly silicon dioxide (SiO₂).

Our recent experiences have taught us the condition of grass and the spacing of trees makes a difference in the severity of a conflagration. High intensity fires spread when they burn in tree canopies or crowns where heat transfers easily from dried leaf to instantly dried leaf.

On the road to Jémez Springs the trees were so closely spaced in 2000 the grasses at the bases of some could ignite the tops of others. This was probably a rare situation caused by lumbering in the early twentieth century. Trees are not normally so dense nor are they all the same age and height.

Low intensity fires spread along the ground through plants and organic debris. It’s difficult for them to jump from trunk to trunk, because there’s too much oxygen between the two poles of carbon for temperatures to sustain them. Instead, they creep up the trunks, charring as they rise.

At moderate temperatures, ground fires may occasionally flare high enough to torch lower leaves. Usually, the trees are too widely spaced for one canopy to ignite another.

The nature of the grass and underbrush also matter. Few lightening strokes produce fires during the monsoon season when it’s raining. Most occur in the dry spring. One Forest Service scientist, Guido Kaminski, found rotted wood ignited but went out quickly. When cheat grass was heated, "the flame of the pilot jumped across the entire fuel bed, consuming it before the test operator could contain it."

Another Forest Service employee, William Pitts, found a mix of pine needles and recently cut tall, wet-season fescue burned at a lower temperature than the other tested fuels, but the quickest flame occurred with dry-season fescue if there was a wind. He found cheat grass also required wind to burn, and a had tendency to smolder. Needles from loblolly pines were the only kindling that would fire without wind.

After the Cerro Grande fire, people who surveyed the grounds saw areas of ash, iron oxides, and clays where once there’d been trees. The reddened soils were ones where the water-containing iron compounds (iron hydroxides) had become so hot they lost their water and some form of hematite emerged. To produce those results, soil temperatures were at least 480 degrees (250C). The severely burned surface may be sterile for some time.

More common were areas where ground litter burned and only charred logs remain. Here soil temperatures were above the boiling point of water and could have been lethal down 2". Even if only ash were present, there were nutrients left to support seeds that blew in from adjoining areas.

Surrounding them were the scorched trees that hadn’t ignited. Over the nearly 6,000 acres reviewed by Raymond Kokaly’s team, nearly half were ash, char or bare ground. More than 15% were conifer dehydrated by heat. Almost 4% were grasses dried into straw. The rest, 28.9%, were still green.

Randy Balice’s group found, outside the lands managed by LANL, 48.6% of the acres burned at high intensity and 42.6% at moderate temperatures. The remaining 8.8% suffered low intensity heat. Fire intensity and fire severity refer to two different phenomena, the one to chemistry and air temperatures, the other to biological consequences and soil temperatures.

In Africa hominins no doubt also walked through fire scarred lands and saw the effects of heat. They may have observed sticky resins released from partly charred trees and transformations in rocks. They also may have noticed differences in the tastes of plant foods roasted by passing heat and tender rejuvenating growths. They certainly would have recognized any hematite.

When we drive through the damaged lands years after the Cerro Grande, we see curiosities. The hominins were trained to observe rocks and plants.

Notes: Fahrenheit conversions of Centigrade temperatures are rounded for ease of understanding.

Balice, Randy G., Kathryn D. Bennett, and Marjorie A. Wright. Burn Severities, Fire Intensities, and Impacts to Major Vegetation Types from the Cerro Grande Fire, 2004; good maps and pictures.

Kaminski, Guido C. Ignition Time vs Temperature for Selected Forest Fuels, November 1974. He was studying fires caused by sparks from chain saws.

Kokaly, Raymond F., Barnaby W. Rockwell, Sandra L. Haire, and Trude V.V. King. "Characterization of Post-fire Surface Cover, Soils, and Burn Severity at the Cerro Grande Fire, New Mexico, Using Hyperspectral and Multispectral Remote Sensing," Remote Sensing of Environment 106:305-325:2007.

Pitts, William M. Ignition of Cellulosic Fuels by Heated and Radiative Surfaces, March 2007. He was studying fires started by hot mufflers and catalytic converters. Loblolly pine is Pinus taeda. His fescue was Festuca arundinacea.

Graphics: All photographs were taken 4 July 2013 along Route 4 from the entrance to Bandelier National Monument to the base of Cerro Grande. The altitudes are from the camera’s GPS interface.

1. United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Space Science and Technology Center Lightening Team, and the Global Hydrology Resource Center. Data from space-based sensors reveal the uneven distribution of worldwide lightning strikes, 10 December 2001. Data obtained from April 1995 to February 2003. Units: flashes/km²/yr.

2. Ponderosa pine on steep hill, burned so severely, little has come back in 13 years. Altitude: 8049'.

3. Area of charred wood. It looks like a dozer knocked down trees like the one laying in back with short needles. The grasses have not revived in the drought, but shrubs have regrown and the trees in the distance weren’t killed. Altitude: 7054'.

4. Close-up of gambel oak in #3. The trunks were scorched enough to kill the buds buried in the sapwood, but the roots have been able to sucker.

5. Gully was not destroyed and juniper have come back. Other sloping ground in the area is still infertile, but the ponderosa pine on the far bank survived. Trees in the distance, closer to Cerro Grande, are still black specks. Altitude: 7211'.

Fire

Back to life in early Spain for a few weeks.

Archaeologists have problems establishing when hominins deliberately used fire. For a while they believed anything that looked like a heated red sediment indicated combustion had occurred. Then, geologists determined the red color at Schöningen came from iron compounds that formed when the nearby lake dried. Similarly, researchers determined the remains that suggested fire and wood ash in China’s Zhoukoudian cave were actually the natural consequences of "water-deposited organic-rich sediment and colluvial reworking of loess."

Archaeologists believe sediments underlying fires were only reddened when they were heated to 390 to 750 degrees F (200 to 400 Celsius). Now they test artifacts with infrared microspectroscopy to determine the highest temperature to which they’ve been exposed and thermoluminescence dating to determine when. Unfortunately, machines can’t distinguish between temperatures caused by man-made fire, wild fire, or volcanic eruptions.

Fire is a chemical reaction that occurs when carbon molecules are heated in an oxygen environment until the two recombine to create carbon dioxide and water. The point of conversion is the explosion we call combustion.

Not all carbon molecules burn easily. Some are embedded in sacs that make ignition difficult. All grass and wood cells contain cellulose fibers suspended in lignin. Both are organic compounds that contain carbon.

Some tars and resins may alter fire behavior slightly by species. Moisture in the sapwood can slow the process. Relative amounts of lignin and cellulose may differ by plant. But, the

chemistry is absolute. When the temperature of wood reaches the boiling point of water, 212 degrees (100C), chemical bonds begin breaking.

By the time temperatures reach 392 (200C), wood begins losing moisture and releases water vapor.

Between 392 and 572 degrees (300C), lignin loses its liquid chemicals and turns to char. Cellulose does not. Technically it has entered the pyrolysis phase. Charcoal is made by this type of controlled heating.

The temperature at which any organic material can burn depends on the chemistry of the material. The temperature at which it can maintain the combustion without contact with a heated surface is absolute.

Cellulose begins to disintegrate around 660 degrees (350C). Carbon bonds begin breaking around 700 to 750 degrees (370 to 400C).

The ignition point is reached around 750 degrees F (400C). After that, a fire is self-sustaining. The heat from the explosion of molecules warms the air so others can ignite. The more explosions, the greater the generated heat and the greater the number of subsequent explosions.

Before that magic temperature, you can only keep something burning by maintaining contact with something hotter. You use flaming kindling to ignite wood in a camp fire. When people use flame throwers to burn weeds, the tools provide a constant heat source to organic matter too widely dispersed to spread heat. One company advertises the propane-fueled temperature of its thrower is 2050 degrees F.

At 842 degrees (450C) wood cells no longer emit the volatile chemicals that color smoke and poison the air. What remains is char that is converted to carbon dioxide and water, until only ashes remain.

Bones burn differently because their carbon is held in different molecular structures. Several students have tried to reproduce paleolithic fires. A girl in Wisconsin found long bones from white-tailed deer would crack to expose the marrow, which dripped into the flames. The fire temperature varied between 275 (135C) and 200 degrees (150C). She used braided grass for her fuel.

She tried again with ribs and long bones from a deer and long bones from a North American elk. This time the temperature reached a thousand degrees (540C) and produced "calcined (decomposed carbon) bone." She’d used a different local grass with a smaller stem diameter.

A group in Finland tried igniting fresh, unbroken bones of elk, bear and grey seal with "dried pine and birch wood." They found a fire composed of 25% bone and the rest wood had a stable temperature, while one that was 75% bone had one that fluctuated. The latter also did not produce enough heat to burn bones thoroughly.

The four also found ribs burned quickly at a high temperature, while long bones burned "slower but at a more stable temperature for a longer time." When they finished the bear bone experiment, they stacked the bones aside. They found after an hour their temperature was 750 degrees (400C), even though they were cold to the touch.

Archaeologists believe the earliest fire users didn’t yet ignite fires with flint and pyrite. Instead, they perpetuated chance fires by keeping them burning and by carrying miniature fires when they migrated. Terrence Twomey thought they might have carried glowing logs from place to place. The Finnish students implied bones kept at the ignition temperature of 400C would have worked better.

Notes:
Berna, Francesco, et alia. "Microstratigraphic Evidence of in situ Fire in the Acheulean Strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa," National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings 109:E1215-E1220:2012, quote on Zhoukoudian cave.

_____, Mareike Stahlschmidt, et alia. "The Schöningen Hearths: Perspectives on Multidisciplinary Geoarchaeological Research and Middle Pleistocene Fire Use in Northern Europe," Developing International Geoarchaeology Conference, 2013.

Glazewski, Megan. "Experiments in Bone Burning," Oshkosh Scholar 1:17-25:2006.

Twomey, Terrence Matthew. Keeping Fire: the Cognitive Implications of Controlled Fire Use by Middle Pleistocene Humans, 2011.

Vaneeckhout, Samuel, Juho-Antti Junno, Anna-Kaisa Puputti, and Tiina Äikäs. "Prehistoric Burned Bone: Use or Refuse - Results of a Bone Combustion Experiment," International Council for Archaeozoology, international conference, 2010.

White, Robert H. and Mark A. Dietenberger. "Fire Safety of Wood Construction" in USDA, Forest Products Laboratory, Wood Handbook, 2010; defines the stages of wood burning.

Hafted Tools

Diets changed during the early Pleistocene even before fire was used for cooking. Glaciers that sequestered water in ice fields affected rainfall levels everywhere on the planet. The drier climate altered vegetation, which in turn encouraged some animal species at the expense of others. Speciation wasn’t limited to the Homo genus.

Acacias spread through Gondwana before Australia began splitting from Africa some 184 million years ago. When legumes began diversifying in the Miocene, acacias also multiplied. The species used for gum arabic, Senegalia senegal, spread from East Africa into Arabia and west toward the Atlantic when savannas replaced rainforests.

During the Pleistocene, Davie Odee’s team said the "contraction and expansion of the Sahara desert in Central and West Africa, and interaction of climate with the Great Rift Valley and the elevated topographies of East and Southern Africa produced wide altitudinal ranges forming a complex mosaic of landscapes and localised climate regimes that functioned as refugia during extreme climate conditions." The drought resistant acacia adapted to lowlands and highlands, "forests, woodlands and savannahs."

Today, acacia seeds are dried for later consumption. In the nineteenth century, William Rhind heard Moors lived "almost entirely" on gum arabic when they were harvesting it in Sénégal and that "six ounces are sufficient for the support of a man during twenty-four hours." Anders Sparrman said, in southern Africa in the 1750s, "the Bushmen live on it for days together" when nothing else was available.

Herbivores browse the pods, leaves, and twigs. In Tanzania, modern elephants and giraffes prefer this species to all others. Leaves and twigs are about 15% crude protein, the green pods about 20%. Middle Stone Age nutrition could have improved when animals found plants with higher food values that then were stored in the blood, bone and muscle that later was consumed by hunters.

Margaret Schoeninger suggested body shape could have changed even when the percentages of animal and vegetables in the diet remained constant. One cause, as mentioned in the last post, would have been cooking. More interesting, she suggested technical modifications that made hunting physically less strenuous could have modified muscle development, which in turn would have effected skeleton formation.

One important innovation was adding handles to tools like the Homo heidelbergensis spears found in Saxony. Composite weapons first appeared at Twin Falls, another heidelbergensis site in the Zambian highlands between the Rift Valley and the Congo basin about 300,000 years ago. They were representative of the Lupemban technology found in Kenya, Zambia, and Tanzania.

Fifty thousand years before Mount Kenya had been glaciated and Kilimanjaro was probably still ice covered. The area would have dried during the cold years. Plant and animal migrations towards the wetter Congo basin may have begun. Hunters who followed might have confronted brush strewn landscapes that weren’t maintained by fires as often.

John Desmond Clark found a number of heavy duty tools at Twin Falls he believed were used for wood working. When Lawrence Barham reexcavated the site twenty some years later he found bone fragments, backed blades suitable for handles, and ochre of various colors.

The backed blades were probably attached to wooden handles with a mastic made from acacia sap. When the tree’s bark is broken, the sap forms globules on the surface. The greater the injury, the more sap. The tears eventually harden.

Unprocessed acacia mastic is not as strong as sap that’s been mixed with quartz or ochre dust. Andrew Zipkin’s team found it didn’t matter which was used. While Barham found ochre at Twin Falls, he didn’t mention finding traces on the backs of blades. It may have disappeared with time or hunters may not yet have recognized its utility.

Lyn Wadley thought joint failure might not have been a problem. She wrote, a "brittle, unloaded adhesive allows a projectile head to disengage its haft and implant itself in an animal; robust adhesive keeps a spearhead safely in its shaft."

If ochre were the reason pieces of colored clay were taken to Twin Falls, Wadley may have unintentionally replicated another part of the invention process when she tried to make mastic from the acacia species available near the Rose Cottage site in South Africa. She said when she was grinding ochre with sandstone, the process reddened "everything in a meterwide radius of the activity. Hands, arms, clothing, work surface, and anything lying nearby become covered in fine, red dust."

Individuals may have noticed their mastic covered hands were less irritated. Acacia sap has been used to treat inflamed skin, including burns. The ochre would have been more noticeable than its carrier. Attributing the healing affects to it would have been a reasonable supposition.

Ochre is a general term for many forms of iron oxides embedded in clay, of which red hematite is the best known. The reasons it was used are speculation: some claim it had symbolic value, some that it was utilitarian, some that its use on weapons was a form of hunting magic. The reason so many types were found at Twin Falls may simply have been the consequence of skilled tool makers experimenting to solve a problem.

Notes: Acacias are a large group of species within the legume family. In 2005 they were divided into four genuses. Before that time the one I’m discussing, Senegalia senegal, was known as Acacia senegal. The acacia used by Wadley was Vachellia/Acacia karroo.

The acid soils in east Africa destroy bones and other organic matter. Twin Falls was dated with uranium-thorium tests. It shares the Lupemban technology with Broken Hill in Zambia where remains of Homo rhodesiensis were found. Palaeontologists now believe rhodesiensis and heidelbergensis were the same.

Allen, O. N. and Ethel K. The Leguminosae, 1981.

Barham, Lawrence. "Backed Tools in Middle Pleistocene Central Africa and Their Evolutionary Significance," Journal of Human Evolution 43:585-603:2002.

Clark, John Desmond. Work discussed by Barham.

Duke, James A. "Acacia senegal (L.) Willd.," Handbook of Energy Crops, 1983.

Odee, D. W., A Telford, J. Wilson, A. Gaye and S. Cavers. "Plio-Pleistocene History and Phylogeography of Acacia senegal in Dry Woodlands and Savannahs of Sub-Saharan Tropical Africa: Evidence of Early Colonisation and Recent Range Expansion," Heredity 109:372-382:2012.

Rhind, William. The History of the Vegetable Kingdom, 1855; he doesn’t give his sources, but was working in Edinburgh.

Ruess, R. W. and F. L. Halter. "The Impact of Large Herbivores on the Seronera Woodlands, Serengeti National Park, Tanzania," African Journal of Ecology 28:259-275:1990.

Schoeninger, Margaret J. "Diet and the Evolution of Modern Human Form In the Middle East," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 58:37-52:1982.

Shanahan, Timothy M. and Marek Zreda. "Chronology of Quaternary Glaciations in East Africa," Earth and Planetary Science Letters 177:23-42:2000.

Sparrman, Anders. A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, Towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, and round the World: but Chiefly into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the year 1772 to 1776, 1789; quoted by Rhind.

Wadley, Lyn. "Putting Ochre to the Test: Replication Studies of Adhesives that May Have Been Used for Hafting Tools in the Middle Stone Age," Journal of Human Evolution 49:587-601:2005.

Zipkin A.M., M. Wagner, K. McGrath, A. S. Brooks, and P. W. Lucas. "An Experimental Study of Hafting Adhesives and the Implications for Compound Tool Technology," PLoS One, 10 November 2014.

The Brain

The human brain has gone through two major changes in size. One occurred two million years ago, when the Homo genus appeared. The second about 800,000 years ago. The changes originated in Africa and diffused with migration.

Leslie Aiello believed the first increase was related to a dietary change from plants to meat. Lucy and the Australopithecus genus were herbivores, Homo habilis were carnivores or omnivores.

Aiello argued meat was easier to digest, so less energy was required to maintain the body. The unused energy was transferred to the brain, with a consequent expansion of brain size and shrinkage of the gut. Her evidence included increased cranial size, inferred gut size reduction from the shape of the thoracic cage and pelvis, the sheen left on stone tools characteristic of contact with tissue, and cut marks on animal bones.

The change in diet set in motion reciprocating changes. With more energy, the brain was able to oversee improvements in technology and hunting. There weren’t changes in form so much as improved skills in hunting and manufacturing. When food became a problem, Homo habilis were able to transfer their skills to new materials and pioneer new locations. Environmental changes challenged their brains to increase mental facilities.

The second increase in brain size occurred at the onset of the first Pleistocene glacial period, the Pre-Pastorian. Soon after, C₄ pathway savannas began displacing woodlands and C₃ grasslands. Lightning ignited fires became more frequent.

Richard Wrangham has suggested the transition to cooked food was responsible for expanding brains. He posits hominins had learned to use fire. The problem has been finding evidence. Archaeologists began looking for reddened soils under rocks, rocks showing signs of having been heated to high temperatures, and traces of organic matter in soils or embedded in stones.

Two years ago, Francesco Berna’s team found ashes, carbonized leaves, and burned bits of bone in the sediments at Wonderwerk in South Africa. The fuel was something that produced a burning temperature between 750 degrees F (400 Celsius) and 1300 (700C) like grass, leaves or brush. They dated the strata to a million years ago. The cave then was inhabited by Homo erectus who used Acheulean tools manufactured from banded ironstone.

The first evidence for use of fire in Europe comes from a Homo erectus site in East Anglia, Beeches Pit, dated to the warm period between the Mindel and Riss glaciers 400,000 years ago. It contained reddened and shattered flints that had been heated to 400 degrees C. The amount of burned material suggests "fires were burnt through prolonged periods, perhaps continuously," by hominins who could use fires, but not ignite them.

A contemporary site at Hanover revealed a slightly more advanced species, Homo heidelbergensis, exploited both wood and heat. They left spears made from spruce and a throwing stick made from pine. There’s also a possibility they were heating resins from the inner bark of birch trees to make adhesives to affix points to spears.

Most of the bones were those of horses, Equus mosbachensis. Archaeologists also found a spruce stick with "carbonisation traces" that might have "functioned as a spit to roast or smoke pieces of meat."

Although the Heidelbergensis may have been using wood, Bibiche Berkholst said the presence of "Stephanorhinus hemitoechus and Bison priscus and the combined absence of the typical temperate forest species Sus scrofa and Capreolus capreolus may point to the disappearance of forests and the beginning of a period with a dominance of steppes." The first was an extinct species of rhinoceros. The others were steppe bison, wild boars, and red deer.

Notes: East Anglia is in England; Hanover is in Germany.

Aiello, Leslie C. and Peter Wheeler. "The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis," Current Anthropology 36:199-221:1995.

Berkholst, Bibiche E. The Large Mammal Fauna of the Pleistocene Site Schöningen 13II: The Levels Schö 13II-1, 13II-2 and 13II-3, 2011.

Berna, Francesco, et alia. "Microstratigraphic Evidence of in situ Fire in the Acheulean Strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa," National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings 109:E1215-E1220:2012.

Gowlett, John A. J. "The Early Settlement of Northern Europe: Fire History in the Context of Climate Change and the Social Brain," Comptes Rendus Palevol 5:299-310:2006.

Roebroeks, Wil and Paola Villa. "On the Earliest Evidence for Habitual Use of Fire in Europe, National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings, 108:5209-5214:2011.

Villa, Paola. Quoted on use of possibility of heated birch bark, University of Colorado Bolder press release for 14 March 2011, "Neanderthals Were Nifty at Controlling Fire, According to Cu-Boulder Researcher. Nothing has been reported since.

Wrangham, Richard W., et alia. "The Raw and the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins," Current Anthropology 40:567-594:1999.

Grist Mills and Captives

Captive labor is expensive. One wonders why settlers in Nuevo México were willing to risk their very survival by trading ammunition in the 1690s, then later their transportation and work animals, to obtain it. In 1720, the use of slaves, rather than servants, as a marker of wealth hadn’t yet percolated north from the sugar colonies.

My guess is Nuevo México used captives to tend livestock and prepare food. The first could be done by children, the second by women. Only large landowners like Sebastían Martín and others in Taos had so many head of cattle they needed outside help. Everyone ate.

Wheat may have been the preferred food, but corn was the reality. In New Spain, commercial wheat growing was capital intensive. Zacatecas was a mining town dependant on the Bajío between the Ríos Lerma and Grande de Santiago south of Mexico City where 28 inches of rain fell most years. By 1600, the newer mining areas of New Galicia obtained most of their wheat from irrigated labores in the Zapotepec valley.

In both regions, religious orders and wealthy men amassed large tracts of land. Grain was sold to urban cabildos on contracts that financed irrigation and storage facilities. Wheat became capital intensive, while maize did not. Corn was grown on small plots by natives, and came to market through small trades.

The northern part of Nuevo México was too dry to support wheat without large irrigation projects, that could only have been undertaken and maintained by captive labor. Even in South Carolina, as mentioned in the post for 2 January 2011, slaves resented time spent on ditches, and refused to do it when they were free.

Every family could grow corn if it had a small ditch. Maize was also cheaper to store. People only had to remove the husks. Cobs could be stacked on roofs or above ceilings where they were relatively safe from vermin.

The ways to prepare it were learned from natives in México. After kernels were removed from ears, they either were ground, two or three times, or boiled. Native American women used stone manos and metates, and so did the Españoles.

In New England, men transferred the technology of grinding wheat to corn very early. Plymouth was founded in 1620. Women used wooden mortars until a beating mill was built in 1633. Massachusetts Bay Colony was formed in 1628. It had a wind-driven grinding mill in 1632, and a water-driven one in 1634.

The erection of mills wasn’t left to chance. "Buhrs to make mill-stones" were purchased from Edward Casson, a London merchant tailor, in 1628. The colony’s organizer, John Winthrop, asked his son to bring millstones "with bracings ready cast, and rings, and mill-bills" from England in 1631.

The availability of water to drive a mill was a prerequisite for establishing a town. Colonists looked for places where they could quarry millable stones. John Winthrop, Jr, established the iron works at Saugus in 1645 to produce parts for Massachusetts and Virginia.

Mills weren’t just a Yankee introduction. Antonio de Arriaga, who came from Badajoz in the Estremadura, established a grist mill on the Río Tacubaya for Mexico City in 1526. Cristóbal García de Zúñiga established a mill on the Río Atoyac in Vera Cruz in the late 1500s.

At Cahokia, in Illinois country, French settlers had two windmills by the 1720s, and the Jesuits another. They probably hadn’t dragged millstones down river from Canada, but found useful rock in the area. Even though most who entered the area were coureurs, they included men who could prepare stones and build mills. They were growing wheat, and not depending on their native wives or other women to grind it by hand.

Mills don’t have to have to be water powered. They can be run by wind or animals. They do need capital to purchase parts. It was easier to ship millstones and iron fittings from London to Boston that it was to haul them from New Spain. Much of the mountainous territory where stones might have been found in Nuevo México was still controlled by hostile bárbaros.

Cristóbal de Velasco did recruit some millers from Mexico City in 1693, but they didn’t work follow that trade in the north. Juan Romero joined the group in Zacatecas, but fled before it reached Santa Fé. Francisco Xavier Romero became a shoemaker in Santa Cruz. Gabriel Anzures moved to Santa Cruz, where his daughter Juana married Diego Martín Serrano, son of Hernán Martín Serrano. There’s no notice of his son, and nothing on his work. He also had been a cart maker.

More than operators and stones were needed to support milling. Decent roads were needed if ox-pulled carts were to bring corn, containers to hold it on the return trip, and ways to store it at home. Millwrights and cartwrights were required to build and repair equipment.

In the absence of automation, servants were the first people called upon to do the more monotonous and physically strenuous household tasks. In 1708, Leonor Domínguez said "the wife of Peter de Avila, alias ‘the louse,’ told her while this declarant was grinding corn kernels." María Domínguez said she "had met the said Leonor Domínguez when she was grinding corn kernels [...] this declarant said that as to have been together grinding corn kernels [...] it is true."

The pronouns are confusing, but they would not have been together if they weren’t in the same household, or if the one wasn’t helping or working for the other.

With the elimination of encomenderos and the limits on repartimiento, women from the pueblos could not be requisitioned to grind corn without being paid. That led to a greater demand for female servants than had existed before the Revolt.

Notes: I haven’t found anyone who discusses why slaves were purchased. This posting is an informed guess.

Bakewell, P. J. Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, Zacatecas 1546-1700, 1971.

Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition.

Cushman, James M. Cohannet Alewives and the Ancient Grist Mill at the Falls on Mill River, 1895.

Daniels, Christine and Michael V. Kennedy. Negotiated Empires, 2013; on García.

Domínguez, Leonor. "New Affidavit and Declaration," 22 May 1708, in Twitchell.

Domínguez, María. "Declaration," 22 May 1708, in Twitchell.

Farfán, Francisco. "List of New Mexico Colonists, Mexico City," on or before July 1693, in Kessell.

Himmerich y Valencia, Robert. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555, 1991; on Arriaga.

Hockensmith, Charles D. The Millstone Industry, 2009; quotations from Winthrop and Casson invoice.

Kessell, John L., Rick Hendricks, and Meredith Dodge. To the Royal Crown Restored, 1995.

Miller, LaDeane. "Descendants of Gabriel Anzures and Maria Francisca," 2002, Denver Public Library Digital Collection.

Morrissey, Robert Michael. Empire by Collaboration, 2015; on Cahokia.

Sandoval Silva y Mendoza, Gaspar de. Directive, Mexico City, 4 September 1693, in Kessell.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 1, 1914.

Van Young, Eric. Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, 1981.

Regulating the Captive Trade

The entrepreneurial role in the captive trade was assumed by Apache bands who desired horses. They set the terms of trade, but families of captives enforced the norms that regulated it. Utes and Shoshone disciplined the Penxaye Apache in July of 1706.

The markets for horses and captives weren’t saturated. According to Hubert Bancroft, Francisco Cuervo was forced to abandon attempts to subdue the Moqui in April of 1707, because troops were needed in Santa Fé to recover horses stolen while he was in the west. No sooner were they recovered, than they disappeared again. In August, José Chacón issued orders prohibiting the sale of presidio horses, and repeated them in 1708.

The trade in captives continued. In 1712, Juan Flores Mogollón again prohibited settlers from visiting "ranches of the wild Indians for the purposes of barter and trade." Two years later, he surrendered authority. Instead of bans, he ordered captives be baptized as if they were African slaves.

The attempted transformation of captives into slaves accelerated under Félix Martínez. In 1716, he ordered an attack on Utes and their allies. Cristóbal de la Serna descended upon a peaceful encampment near Antonio mountain. Martínez sent the captives to Nueva Viscaya where they were sold. He divided the profits with his brother.

Sebastían Martín’s descendants told Ralph Twitchell in the early twentieth century, that he had been the one responsible, and that the raid had been led by two of this sons-in-laws, Juan Antonio de Padilla and Carlos Fernandéz. The latter wasn’t involved; he didn’t marry into the family until much later. However, Serna’s daughter had married Martín’s nephew, Nicolás Jacinto Martín, in 1712.

The sale of captives into slavery violated one of the unwritten rules of the captive trade. As long as captives were kept in Nuevo México, it was possible to see them, or at least hear about them. They, no doubt, were sources of information about colonial life, and maltreatment would have been known. It was even possible for captives to escape. Exile to distant lands was a death sentence.

Regulatory enforcement of Martínez’s misbehavior took awhile, but relatives of the 1716 victims raided Serna’s ranch at Embudo in 1719. They took four hoses and a captive boy. The same night they shot arrows at Diego Romero in Arroyo Hondo. He was able to flee to safety.

Something had changed. When not enough horses were available for trade, they were stolen. José López Naranjo noticed an increase in thefts around 1718. Perhaps there were, indeed, fewer horses available, perhaps there were more natives. Not only did native sons come of age, but more Shoshone may have been filtering south.

Shoshone attitudes toward the Apache, who were selling captives, hardened. Miguel de la Vega y Coca, alcalde of Taos and Picurís said they came "for the purpose of interfering with the little barter which this kingdom has with the nations which come in to ransom."

Santa Fé merchant Jean l'Archevêque added, "that for more than seven or eight years they have come to steal horses and rob herds and run away with the goods in the trade which this kingdom has with the Apaches of El Cuartelejo." He called the proposed expedition against the Utes a "just war." In fact, to him, it was a just trade war.

Diego Romero was described as a coyote by the local alcalde, Miguel Tenorio de Alba. What he was doing so far north and west of Taos pueblo isn’t known. He may have used captive labor, he may have been a middleman, he may have been an unexpected witness.

Angélico Chávez said he was the great-grandson of Francisco Cadimo, who came as a soldier with Oñate. Francisco had two daughters. One must have had an illegitimate child, Alonso Cadimo, who lived with Felipe Romero in the Río Abajo before the revolt and took his last name. Chávez identified Alonso as a criado.

Diego had some ties to La Cañada. In 1661, Felipe Romero had been associated with Bartolomé Gómez Robledo. There was another Alonso Romero, who was the son of Miguel Romero de la Cruz. The Inquisition prosecuted him for bigamy after he married Bartolomé’s niece, María. Diego’s mother later married Mateo Trujillo. He himself "acquired considerable land at Taos," according to Chávez.

The attack on Romero frightened the pueblo priest into writing the governor. Juan de la Cruz said, "all the valley of Taos is harassed by a growing number of Utes" and "it is feared that they might attack the pueblo or do some injury."

Coincidentally, the priest at Cochití pueblo, Manuel de la Peña, said a Queres had been killed by Utes. When they went searching for them, they found evidence a great many had been in the area.

Antonio Valverde called a council of war in August. Each man repeated the same words, that they came as friends, but stole their horses. Serna added, with the murders, they "have declared themselves enemies, let war be made." Those who testified after him repeated his words.

The council authorized an expedition led by the governor. On the plains they were joined by warriors from Sierra Blanca under Carlana. Whenever they met Apache families, they were told of depredations. However, they never saw more than remains of camp sites.

The alliance between the Ute and the Shoshone frayed. Around 1719, the Ute began grouping them with the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa as Komántica. Marvin Opler was told, that meant "anyone who wants to fight with me all the time." Ernest Wallace said, they narrowed the term to refer only to Comanche around 1726.

The captives for horses trade continued, with little official interference. The identities of the captives and the sellers changed. In 1732, the governor, Gervasio Cruzat y Góngora, tried to assert some Apache were under the protection of the government, and weren’t to be sold. Five years later, the next governor condoned trades that were treated as ransoms. Enrique de Olavide only asked to be notified.

Notes: Mooney believed the first document to use Cumanche was the 1719 dairy of Valverde. It referred to "naciones Yutas y Cumanches." The meetings of the council of war held a month earlier used the term "los Yndios Yutas." I am using Shoshone until 1719. I suspect most translations of earlier documents used the common term, and not the historic one, especially when some of the historic terms were confusing.

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888, 1889.

Chacón Medina Salazar y Villaseñor, José. Order, prohibiting the sale of horses from the horse herd, 11 August 1707; order, prohibiting the taking of horses or mules from the caballada. 6 May 1708; in Twitchell, Archives.

Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition.

Cruz, Juan de la. Letter to the governor, Antonio Valverde Cosio, 12 August 1719; in Thomas.

Cruzat y Góngora, Gervasio. Bando, prohibiting the sale of Apache captives to the Pueblo Indians, 6 December 1732; in Twitchell, Archives.

Flores Magollón, Juan Ignacio. Order, prohibiting the settlers visiting the ranches of the wild Indians, 16 December 1712; bando, ordering the baptism of Apache captives in the same manner as Negro slaves, 26 September 1714; in Twitchell, Archives.

L'Archevêque, Jean. Opinion on proposed expedition, 19 August 1719; in Thomas.

Mooney, James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, 1896.

Naranjo, José López. Opinion on proposed expedition, 19 August 1719; in Thomas.

Olavide y Michelena, Enrique. Bando, in relation to trade with the wild tribes, 7 January 1737; cited by Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 2008.

Opler, Marvin K. "The Origins of Comanche and Ute," American Anthropologist 45:155-158:1943.

Peña, Manuel de la. Letter to Antonio Valverde quoted by Thomas.

Serna, Cristobal de la. Opinion on proposed expedition, 19 August 1719; in Thomas.

Thomas, Alfred B. After Coronado, 1935.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. The Leading Facts of New Mexico History, volume 1, 1911; on Martínez family legend.

_____. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 2, 1914.

Ulibarrí, Juan de. Diary of expedition to El Cuartelejo, 1706; in Thomas; on Penxaye Apache.

Valverde y Cosío, Antonio. Diary of the campaign against the Ute and Comanche Indians, 1719; in Thomas.

Wallace, Ernest and E. Adamson Hoebel. The Comanches, 1986 edition.

Captives for Horses

Slavery is an economic transaction. It requires at least one merchant, some customers, and rules for doing business.

Españoles had relied on native and captive labor before the Pueblo Revolt of 1690. Diego de Vargas legitimized its reintroduction in 1694 when he gave 342 captive Cochití women and children to settlers and soldiers.

The business relationship between buyers and the providers of captives became asymmetric. Sellers had an unlimited supply of valuable captives, but Nuevo México had little of value to offer in return. In the east, English and French traders imported metal tools and utensils, but Spanish goods were scarce and deemed inferior.

When the French ran short of inventory, the more ingenious began fabricating desirable items. To encourage native conversions, northern Jesuits had given away brass finger-rings embossed with symbolic letters or the Mexican bleeding heart. After they became valued, the rings were taken over as trade goods by the coureurs. Judith Hauser hasn’t found references to where they were manufactured, but thinks the cruder ones used in the fur trade after 1700 must have been made in home workshops.

Charles Town merchants converted guns into currency. In 1700, a native near Mobile Bay told Charles Levasseur, an aide to Henri Tonti, "men take the women and children away and sell them to the English, each person being traded for a gun." Thomas Nairne discovered a higher exchange rate in 1708: Chickasaw and Talapoosie claimed they received "‘a Gun, ammunition, horse, hatchet, and suit of Cloathes’ for just one slave - a whole year’s worth of deerskins."

Nuevo México refused to trade weapons, partly for religious reasons, partly from memories of the Revolt. In 1696, Plains Apaches came to San Juan to sell Ute women and children. No notice was made if other Shoshone speakers were among the captives. Gerald Betty didn’t report what they took in exchange, but in July of that year de Vargas acted to stop colonists from selling arms to natives in July. In October, he gave 84 women and children to soldiers.

De Vargas unintentionally created the substitute exchange medium when he confiscated horses from the pueblos. To regain their livestock, natives raided and traded. Settlers from Taos began visiting Apache villages to trade "two or three horses for a captive boy or girl." In 1703 he prohibited such activities, but two years later his successor, Francisco Cuervo, issued a new set of bans.

The complaints to de Vargas and Cuervo didn’t come from the friars, but from the cabildo in Santa Fé. This implied they were more concerned with the potential development of a competing trade center, than with the ethics of the business. Unlike, the English and the French, Nuevo México didn’t develop a true merchant class that could have organized the trade to the benefit of all.

The closest the city had was a captive reared in the same northern trading culture as many of the coureurs. Jean l’Archevêque was born in Bayonne, France, in 1672 to a Huguenot family that had moved there when his grandfather converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1650s. Jean’s parents subsequently moved to Saint Dominique on the western side of Hispañola.

A French pirate, Jean le Vasseur, had established a Huguenot colony on Tortuga, a small island off Hispañola’s northwest coast in 1640. The Spanish ousted them, but Bertrand d’Ogeron retook control and moved onto the main island where he encouraged tobacco plantations. Saint-Dominique was just converting to sugarcane when La Salle’s flotilla of colonists landed at the port of Petit-Goâve.

At some time, l’Archevêque was apprenticed to Pierre Duhaut. Sources disagree if the merchant was already on the island, or arrived with La Salle. The boy, just shy of twelve years of age, joined the expedition. When disaster follower disaster, Duhaut murdered La Salle in 1687 by using the lad as a decoy.

After he was allowed to retire from the presidio, probably in 1714 when he joined the council of war, l’Archevêque became a merchant banker importing goods from México.

Notes:
Axtell, James. The Indians’ New South, 1997.

Betty, Gerald. Comanche Society, 2002; quotation on Taos transaction.

Cabildo de Santa Fé. Petition, complaining about sale of horses, 26 November 1703; petition, relative to bartering with the Apache, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.

Cuervo y Valdés, Francisco. Decree, relative to bartering with the Apaches, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.

De Vargas, Diego. Bando, prohibiting sale of arms, 31 May 1696; bando, prohibiting soldiers from gambling for their horses, 3 November 1703; decree, regarding sale of horses, 26 November 1703; in Twitchell.

Hauser, Judith Ann. Jesuit Rings from Fort Michimackinac and Other European Contact Sites, 1982.

Lafleur, Gérard and Lucien Abénon. "The Protestants and the Colonization of the French West Indies," in Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, 2003.

Levasseur, Charles. Voyage de M. de Sauvole, 1701, translated by Vernon J. Knight, Junior, and Sherée L. Adams in "A Voyage to the Mobile and Tomeh in 1700, with Notes on the Interior of Alabama," Ethnohistory 28:179-194:1981; quote by Axtell.

Nairne, Thomas. Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, edited by Alexander Moore, 1988; quoted by Axtell.

Páez Hurtado, Juan. Letter, relative to bartering with Apache, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 2, 1914.

Weddle, Robert S. The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle, 2001; thinks Duhaut was with La Salle.

Wikipedia. "Jean l'Archevêque;" thinks Duhaut was in Saint-Dominique.

Comanche Origins

The Shoshone split into what would become the Snake and Comanche sometime after they moved through Wyoming’s South Pass. Some went north where they ultimately settled in what is now Idaho. Others went south where they joined the Ute.

Comanche have several legends explaining what happened. In 1848 George Ruxton was told the chief from one band criticized the chief of another for bathing in a medicine spring where he drank. The first was already angry because he had failed to find any game and the other had a "fat deer." He drowned the man, and his band had to move away.

Post Oak Jim heard a different version, also rooted in conflict, in 1933. Several bands were camped together, when one boy accidentally kicked another during a game. After the injured boy died, his father, the chief of one band, challenged the warriors of the other band to battle. An older man intervened, saying it was an accident, asked why should one group be exterminated. They negotiated a separation, with the chief’s group going north and the other south. Before they left, smallpox broke out.

People in Oklahoma told Dick Banks, they were heading northwest over the timber line, when some became unhappy because there was no fire wood and they feared the climate would be colder. The leader called a council, but the dissidents left anyway. Robert Thomas heard the group was traveling south when they heard a wolf howl. One refused to continue, and returned north. The other continued south.

James Mooney and Ernest Wallace both believed the division actually was precipitated by pressures from other tribes to the east, but neither adequately identified the source. Douglas Bamforth has tried to reconstruct the location of linguistic groups in 1700. He thought the Kiowa were directly east of the Shoshone, with the Ute to the south.

The Kiowa migration was related to Iroquois battles for dominance in the fur trade. After the Huron were decimated by the Iroquois in 1649, the Ottawa took the Huron’s place as middlemen between the bands collecting furs and the French. The Iroquois forced them into eastern Wisconsin in 1651, where they joined the refugee Potawatomi. Population pressures motivated the Dakota, who were in western Wisconsin and Minnesota to begin moving into the Dakotas. That in turn dislodged the Arapaho and Cheyenne.

The trade in pelts, inevitably, would have reached the Kiowa: it required a constant supply of fur-bearing animals that were killed in large enough numbers to depopulate areas. During the winter of 1660, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers visited the Dakota west of Lake Superior and met with Cree. They were the ultimate suppliers to the Ottawa. From them, the two heard about Hudson Bay. When the coureurs de boise returned to Montréal with furs and a proposal for shorter shipping route, they were rebuked.

The brothers-in-law left for New England, hoping to interest the English or Dutch. In Boston, George Cartwright forwarded them to James, the younger brother of Charles II. The future king and his cousin, Rupert, formed the Hudson Bay Company to enter the fur trade with the Cree. The group built its firsts post in the far north in 1668.

The consequence was, that while the Iroquois were pushing bands west, the Cree were probably stopping them from moving into fur lands to the north. The combination of pressures made the south the safest sanctuary, especially in the years between 1680 and 1693 when the Spanish were far to the south.

A few years ago, Severin Fowles was directing an archaeological survey of the Río Grande gorge. They came across rock art that depicted "horses and ceremonial hide bags." They called together experts from interested tribes to help identify the artists. They all agreed it was done by Comanche.

The most interesting "showed a galloping horse and a comet in the sky, both heading toward the sun." The Great Comet of 1680 had an unusually long tail that was even visible in daylight. Eusebio Kino saw it in Cádiz late that year, and observed it again when he arrived in Mexico City. It was visible in Europe from 30 November to 19 March of 1681.

The date of the comet doesn’t mean the drawing was made that year, but it does suggest Comanche were hunting in the area while the visual memory of the brilliant light was still fresh.

Notes: Huron also are known as Wyandot.

Bamforth, Douglas B. Ecology and Human Organization on the Great Plains, 1988.
Bank, Dick. Collected by Bessie L. Thomas, 29 March 1938, for WPA.

Fowles, Severin. Interviewed by Eric A. Powell, "Searching for the Comanche Empire," Archaeology, 13 May 2014.

Grinnell, George B. "Who Were the Padouca?", American Anthropologist 22:248-260:1920.
Mooney, James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, 1896.

Nute, Grace Lee. "Chouart des Groseilliers, Médard," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, volume 1, 1966.

_____. "Radisson, Pierre-Esprit," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, volume 2, 1969.

Post Oak Jim (Nayia). Collected for Santa Fé Laboratory of Anthropology, 1933, quoted by Wallace.

Ruxton, George Frederick. 　Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, 1848. Grinnell identified the location as Fountain Creek, north of Pueblo, Colorado.

Sultzman, Lee. "Ottawa History," Dick Shovel website.

Thompson, Robert F. Collected from self, 27 October 1937, for WPA.

United States, Works Progress Administration. Indian-Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, deposited with the University of Oklahoma, Western History Collections.

Wallace, Ernest and E. Adamson Hoebel. The Comanches, 1986 edition. They include another version about two bands disagreeing over the distribution of bear meat that had been killed. He didn’t give a source for the legend.

Wikipedia. "Great Comet of 1680."

Graphics: Based on map in Bamforth.

Shoshone Food

Many people in this country may no longer live on a flat Earth, but they still think in two dimensions.

The earliest settlers only recognized latitude. They knew the sugar that grew in Barbados wouldn’t do in Virginia, the tobacco that made Virginia wealthy wouldn’t survive in Boston, that Boston was more congenial to farmers than Maine or New Brunswick.

As people moved west, they gradually became aware that longitude mattered. However, it wasn’t important until they reached the 100th meridian. There they saw the beginning of what they called the great American desert, the great dry plains that only supported settlement with the aide of artesian wells.

With the acquisition of the southwest from México after the Mexican War, US citizens moved into mountainous areas and discovered the importance of altitude. In 1889, Hart Merriam went to Flagstaff to investigate vegetation by elevation in the San Francisco mountains and Grand Canyon. He defined seven life zones: Lower Sonoran, Upper Sonoran, Transition, Canadian, Hudsonian, Timberline and Arctic-Alpine.

His terms, especially Sonoran, were specific to Arizona: the Chihuahuan desert south of New Mexico is considered a different biotic sphere. The labels used by the Forest Service have evolved to identify trees or plants characteristic of an altitudinal band: chaparral and grassland, piñon-juniper woodland, ponderosa pine forest, fir-aspen forest, fir-spruce forest, arctic-alpine-timerline, and alpine tundra.

This part of New Mexico lies in the Upper Sonoran or piñon-juniper belt between 5000' and 7000'. While Merriam was thinking specifically of Colorado Piñon and Utah Juniper, here it’s Colorado Pinus edulis and single-seeded Juniperus monosperma that are common.

Merriam thought temperature was the determining factor in the southwest, that it decreased with elevation while precipitation increased. His brother-in-law, Vernon Bailey, suggested the major factor separating areas within the piñon-juniper province in New Mexico was humidity. A LANL team headed by Kevin Reid theorized it was soil moisture on the Pajarito Plateau.

Julian Steward used these vegetation categories to describe foods available to Shoshone. The highest and lowest levels provided little that was edible, although the area above the timberline did provide forage for game animals. Food plants were concentrated between 5000' and 1100'.

The spruce-fir zone provided grasses and fruits from wine gooseberry, wax currant, and mountain red elderberry.

Between 7400' and 9500' feet in the aspen-fir zone, eleven species may have provided food. In addition to four types of grass, there were shrubs like western serviceberry, black chokecherry, Fendler’s rose, and mountain red and Rocky mountain elderberries. Strawberries may also have been eaten.

The area between it and the piñon-juniper belt had eleven nutritional plants. Eight were grasses. The shrubs included Serviceberry, roses, and possibly thimbleberry.

Steward didn’t find many plants unique to the 5000' to 7000' range, except, of course, piñon. Instead, plants known from high elevations also occurred in favored locations.

More plants existed the farther bands ranged north in Idaho where camas and tobacco root grew in moist prairies.

Steward also listed the common animals eaten by the Shoshone and described how they were hunted. However, he didn’t connect them to ecological zones or seasons.

Notes:
Bailey, Vernon. Life Zones and Crop Zones of New Mexico, 1913.

Merriam, C. H. and L. Steineger. Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and the Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona, 1890.

Reid, Kevin D., Bradford J. Wilcox, David D. Breshears, and Lee MacDonald. "Runoff and Erosion in a Piñon-Juniper Woodland: Influence of Vegetation Patches," Soil Science Society of America Journal 63:1869-1879:1999.

Steward, Julian H. Basin-Plateau Sociopolitical Groups, 1938. Plant names have been standardized to current usage. Latin names are:

Camas - Camassia quamash
Chokecherry, black - Prunus virginiana var. melanocarpa
Currant, wax - Ribes cereum
Elderberry, mountain red - Sambucus microbotrys
Elderberry, Rocky mountain - Sambucus racemosa var. melanocarpa
Gooseberry, wine - Ribes inerme var. inerme
Rose, Fendler’s - Rosa woodsii var. fendleri
Serviceberry, western - Amelanchier alnifolia
Thimbleberry - Rubus parvifiorus
Tobacco root - Valeriana edulis

Strawberry - Steward did not specify but the woods strawberry, Fragaria vesca grows in west central Idaho and wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana, grows at different levels in the Great Basin.