In our first reading assignment, a few key concepts stuck out to me that I wanted to ponder about further. First and foremost is the rapid disappearance of the Clovis culture. The book brings up the two viewpoints of how this might have happened; did the Clovis people die out due to dry climate or did they hunt the wooly mammoth to extinction? It's common knowledge that when one species goes extinct it can dramatically affect all surrounding species, especially if one is predator and the other is prey. However, I disagree with the viewpoint that the Clovis people hunted the wooly mammoth to extinction. Throughout this week's readings it's mentioned that we originated in Africa and then our early ancestors migrated across the many continents. If the Colvis people's primary food source had disappeared, could they not have just migrated to another location? The next group of people mentioned in the book hunt on the great plains, which makes me wonder why the Clovis people didn't just try to move to a new location. I suppose we will never know for sure.
Another concept that stood out to me was the lack of desire in the hunter/gatherer people of Australia for material goods that they did not view as essential for survival. They only took what they needed from the land and were perfectly happy with that. When I read segments like these it makes me pessimistic about our current society, because we take a lot more than we need to survive. I know that in today's society, for example, I need a computer to be typing out this very blog post in order to achieve a decent grade, but I don't truly need this computer to survive. Greed and desire were perhaps less prevalent in these Australian hunter/gatherers, which is why Captain James Cook in 1770 was perplexed.
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