✽
Hundreds of hooves thunder, announcing the herd’s approach. A cloud of dust rolls closer. The low mooing of wildebeest is within earshot.
Every year, when the seasons change in Eastern Africa, millions of large herbivores journey to find food and water. Along the way, zebras, gazelles, elephants, and other animal icons evade predators, cross treacherous rivers, and risk deadly diseases. The largest of these mass migrations, a 300-mile loop across Kenya and Tanzania, has been nicknamed the greatest spectacle on Earth.
Witnessing this grandiose scene, it may feel like the animals and their ancestors have been undertaking these migrations since time immemorial. For me, an archaeologist, it’s easy to imagine ancient foragers there, too, traveling long distances to hunt the animals.
I’m not alone: For decades, archaeologists have believed that these seasonal migrations—of herbivores and humans pursuing them—extended back to at least the last ice age’s peak, some 20,000 years ago.
But over the last decade or so, new research on food scraps from archaeological sites and chemical signatures in fossil teeth challenge this story. It seems past hunter-gatherers traveled less than we archaeologists thought. Many groups hunted a broader variety of nonmigratory animals close to their camps.
As for the iconic migrating herds, we are also beginning to think that many of these seasonal journeys only started within the last 10,000 years. Migratory behavior may come and go throughout the deep history of an animal species. That means conservation efforts should not just focus on preserving routes existing today but also understand the ecological conditions that spur or deter spectacular migrations.
PAST AND PRESENT FORAGERS
Members of our species, Homo sapiens, have been hunting and gathering since our kind appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Other means of obtaining food—pastoralism, farming, agriculture—only emerged in some places about 10,000 years ago, and in most corners of Earth much later.
For clues about how our ancestors lived for most of our history, archaeologists observe contemporary groups that mainly eat wild plants and animals. Of course, these modern foragers live differently than their spear-wielding predecessors: Historical and contemporary hunter-gatherer societies exchange food with non-foragers, and some hunt with modern weapons such as guns. The type and abundance of animals today are also different compared to the past.
