For years I have been guiding people out into northern New Mexico and the question comes up often: were there bison in northern New Mexico before modern civilization killed most of the wildlife here?
That is an interesting question. Bison were plains animals. If you went over Glorieta Pass and into the big grassy place that stretches from Pecos clear to the Dakotas, you would have seen the bison who survived the persistent hunting interests of the various plains tribes.
First, think about bison antiquus. Ancient bison, roamed New Mexico for thousands of years, even up into the forests and far down into the Mexican frontier. The animals looked like the bison of today, but they were frighteningly large, about 20% larger than today’s bison. Emerging from the Pleistocene when the land was populated with short-faced bears, saber toothed tigers, dire wolves and sloths, bison antiquus managed to outlive these other animals and go on to interact with bands of humans for thousands of years.
The Pleistocene was that period of the ice age that people don’t like to think about. It wasn’t that long ago. We can think about the dinosaurs, for example, that were here 150 million years ago. But the Pleistocene was only 11,000 years ago. It was very recent by geologic standards and anthropologists run around New Mexico finding the various stone points that people made after the Pleistocene. They find points, figure out when they were made and by whom, and they create a sequence of understanding of the people who lived in the harsh environment of what is now New Mexico for thousands of years before people settled down into villages.
Anybody with an ounce of education knows about the Folsom point (spearpoint) that was found by a black cowboy who was more interested in paleontology than in the smelly cattle he was sent to herd in the wastelands of northeastern New Mexico. George McJunkin in 1908 noticed big bones poking out of the side of an arroyo, down far enough in the sediments to indicate great age. Among them he found a big stone point, the kind an ancient hunter would have put on a lance and hurled into the flesh of bison antiquus. Then the hunters would have cleaned and cooked the bison, probably ending a long period of hunger out in the grasslands for the group he was with.
McJunkin called the point to the attention of academics who confirmed his instincts. The point was about 10,000 years old. Similar points were found in Sandia Cave and then a sequence of other points all over New Mexico and elsewhere the related to the evolving ancient people who wandered old New Mexico chasing bison antiquus and other animals. You can imagine life with a group of family and friends hunting, killing, and cooking the flesh of animals on fires. Eventually these “archaic” people began to eat plants more and depend on animal flesh less.
About 10,000 years ago bison antiquus went extinct. Nobody is sure exactly why, but biologists think that our contemporary bison, bison bison, evolved from these bigger animals. Perhaps the smaller bison bison is better adapted to the drier, warmer climate of the last 10,000 years. Perhaps it is better at running from people and goring them to death when needed. (Bison regularly gore tourists at Yellowstone National Park. Their horns, when driven into a soft hamburger-fed modern human by a bison weighing 2000 pounds and running at 30 miles per hour can do some serious damage.)
Of course, humans do serious damage to bison also. The tens of millions of bison that roamed the plains until the1880s were killed off by European and Native Americans who slaughtered them with wanton viciousness. By 1890 only 100 were left. Yellowstone National Park has the last remaining herd of wild bison.
