I'm thinking .458 Winchester.

Plenty of good eating off one of those hairy beasts. And you can make a great chess set from the tusks.

Geez! I thought this was another post about lefty-feminists!

Someone get these guys a copy of Jurassic Park! Quick!

The methane gas would warm the world so much says Gore and his sidekick Suzuki boy, we would need a fart trade exchange. The French are not impressed.

...OK 'nuff brewskies for moi, got'an election to watch tonight.

Vive la American revoluzion!!!

It is very likely that by the time "Ole Wooly" is free ranging again all Dodges will be very extinct.

just what the world needs. more stupid.

I am so glad that I drive a Plymouth.

Grok .50 cal I reckon.

They hunted a form of horse to extinction too:

"Most of the evolutionary development of the horse (54 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago) actually took place in North America, where they developed the very successful strategy of grazing (eating grass) rather than browsing (eating softer succulent leaves).
...
Horses (Equus)continued to evolve and develop for another six million years after Pliohippus and became very successful, spreading throughout North America. At some point some of them crossed into the Old World via the Arctic-Asia land bridge. Then, suddenly, no one is absolutely certain why, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, Equus disappeared from North and South America."

My eye nobody is certain. They disappeared shortly after the Indians arrived.

www.discoverseaz.com/History/Horse.html

PS for a country with an average age of 53 and zero natural resources Japan is doing a remarkable job of maintaining their standard of living - without immigration.

Soooo - we don't have to worry about those GW endangered polar bears right? Just freeze one.

Not to worry people. The Dodge couldn't carry a load as big as a wooly!!

methodist - I have strong doubts about the veracity of your suggestion that the N. American horse was made extinct by the indigeneous peoples.

The horse was not a source of food; furthermore, there is no record in oral tales of the use of the horse. In many cases, species become extinct for purely natural reasons.

As for the re-introduction of the mammoth and other extinct species, I think such suggestions ignore this fact: that many species became extinct for valid biological reasons. The mammoth, for example, declined because of temperature changes which changed the environment in which they lived; there is no such environment today that would be suitable for these creatures.

Remember kids!
You can make really cool showers out of them too.

Hairy guy in your tree fort.

PS for a country with an average age of 53

HUH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When's the season open?

ET:"In many cases, species become extinct for purely natural reasons. "

Including just plain old bad luck. Like an STD which makes you sterile. Or genetic isolation that - eventhough there enough creatures total, their ranges are broken up, so each sub population gets inbred.

Lots of creatures seem to have evolved to somewhere they were just not valid competitors, or their children were not survivable in a new threat environment. (Let's say our woolies children suddenly meet .. slightly smaller wolves that run them to exhaustion. )

"The horse was not a source of food; furthermore, there is no record in oral tales of the use of the horse. In many cases, species become extinct for purely natural reasons. "

Oral tales from 10,000 years ago? Get real. There's no way something as specific "as specie that is no longer there to to be described" is going to survive 10 millenia of oral tradition.

If you say that "in the bone heaps we have discovered from early North Americans there are no horse bones" that's perhaps more valid, based on (I'm willing to bet.) small sample size.

This is why I will never surrender my guns, including an anti-material rifle.

"In many cases, species become extinct for purely natural reasons."

Like another species eating them all... Wait... Doh!

I'm no expert, but I believe if Native Americans could have domesticated the horse, they would have, and not hunted them into extinction.

Through domestication you not only have the advantage of breeding for meat and hides, but also for milk, which is an ongoing nutritional bonus. Not to mention the significant advantage of the whole "beast of burden" thing.

When horses (relatively) recently arrived on the continent for the first time, natives used to them expertly to hunt buffalo - this was their golden period before European contact. They didn't try hunt this new species into extinction.

My thoughts anyways.

All that time, money, and brain work to clone a mouse, a creature most of us go out of our way to kill.

Couldn't they clone say Jessica Simpson, so that we could all have one?

noddyrules

Geez, why do I spend my time thinking about things like horse domestication, when you have the best idea of all?

Teach - there are lots of things out there besides feminists that have lots of hair attached to it. Well, OK - not that many, I guess.

I'm wondering if they could clone some real men from around 100 years ago. I'm certainly the first to admit I don't seem to have the same stuff those guys had.

Woolly mammoths weighed up to 10 tones. Your .50 cal would have its work cut out for it, better stand back a kilometer or two in case you miss a vital organ.
A large male Moose for comparison weighs about 1,200 lbs.

the old man river dam site caused a diversion that unearthed a horse bone site. it was pretty evident that the locals at the time enjoyed the movable feast , they didnt figure riding them till they saw the spaniards a few millenium later.

not sure if the kennewick man was a rider , dirty causcasoid in the middle of the archeological record.

Who said I had 50 cal, son? 50 cal is for wussies.

fred2 - I'm not sure what 'plain old bad luck' has to do as a reason for extinction. But, it's biologically natural for species to become extinct, and for new adaptations to emerge.

The planet is not a stable ecological system; the environment is constantly changing, and if a particular species becomes too rigid in a niche, then when that niche environment changes, or if other factors change, such as rainfall, temperature, etc, the species can become extinct. This is hardly unusual or novel.

Yes, oral tales from 10,000, and 5,000 and 1,000 years ago. Also hardly unusual. The oral method of history-keeping was/is quite capable of remembering a species that is now extinct.

But, apparently, about 10-8,000 years ago, the horse, as well as a number of other plants and animals, became extinct in N. America. A key suggestion for the extinction of the horse is that the climate became dryer and the type of grasses changed to ones that were unsuitable for their teeth and digestion.

It is a key to the societal structure of N. American indigeneous peoples that, as in Africa, there were no animals suitable for domestication, such as the horse, cattle, etc. This greatly reduced the 'energy-capacity' of such a society and reduced its capacity for large populations.

"it was pretty evident that the locals at the time enjoyed the movable feast , they didnt figure riding them till they saw the spaniards a few millenium later. "

How big were they? I'll guess they were probably not very and it would have taken a lot of breeding to make them useful load carriers. which if you are a neolithic hunter gatherer "savage" is WAAAY outside your planning horizon.

Besides, how many animals did pre-euro North Americans domesticate, or for that matter Africans ( I think africans have got chickens, but I may be wrong.) they just hadn't gotten to the developmental stage where domestication really helps with your immediate problems.

The horse only became rideable from the forward position relatively recently and as a result of selective breeding. Hieroglyphs show the earliest riders rode from the back and the horses were smaller. The horses the Indians hunted to death would not have been suitable for riding or even load pulling. From Keegan, A History of Warfare, p. 156:

The horse that homo sapiens first knew was a poor thing; so poor, indeed, that man hunted it for food. Equus, the ancestor of equus caballus, our modern horse, was actually hunted out of existence in the Americas by the Amerindians who crossed into the New World at the end of the last ice age. In the Old World the return of the forests after the end of the ice age drove equus caballus out of Europe on to the treeless steppe, where it was first hunted and then domesticated for its flesh."

The change from meat giver to load puller is dated second millenium BC.

Just need BIGGER trucks then! Wouldn't we?

When I saw the title of this thread, for some reason I though it was about Judy Rebick.

I guess I misread SOB as SOW. Of course then again, I can't think of a much better argument against cloning.

My Guide Gun could drop one. It's all about shot placement, especially if the shot you place involves a big bullet.

methodist - that's just one argument; another argument is that the N. American horse became extinct due to an environmental change of grasses to which it could not adapt.

fred2 - no, you are quite incorrect in your view of 'developmental stages'. There's no such thing in human history, i.e., a linear or developmental evolution of societal types.

The social structure, which includes its economy, is directly related to its environment. So, if that environment does not include animals suitable for domestication, then, your economy is only able to support a small population that can be sustained by horticulture or hunting and gathering. Again, this has nothing to do with 'intelligence'. We are all the same human species. The difference is due to the environment.

Most of the African continent has no animals suitable for domestication - eg, lions, hippopotamus, various members of the deer family. None of them can be domesticated. In N. Africa, you can domesticate the camel and goat.
In other parts of Africa, in the equator rainforest zone, the only animals are small; no hooved animals (eg cows, etc) as the water would rot their hooves.
Chickens would have been brought in by Europeans.

N. America was similar; no animals to domesticate; you can't domesticate deer or caribou or moose.

The lack of animals that could be domesticated was a 'ceiling' on population numbers and therefore, kept these societal structures technologically basic. No need for advances in technology because your population did not grow beyong the current carrying capacity of your environment.

Again, there is no such thing as a linear development of societies. The key factor is the environment - how many people can that soil type, that water supply, that temperature, those local animals and plants..support?

I'm going to need a bigger barbeque ...

"When I saw the title of this thread, for some reason I though it was about Judy Rebick."
and when I saw it I thought Kate was having another go at -Left-Wing Hairy Vagina-Gazers

Hey folks, you forgot all about the Buffalo. The Indians didn't need to domesticate anything. The Buffalo looked after themselves, and basically just walked right up to the camps. They were impossible to domesticate anyway, and no similar animal (horse, cow, etc.) could compete for grazing. The Indians picked the lifestyle that best suited their situation.

The white man's first task was to wipe out the Buffalo to preserve the grazing land for cattle. It's what we knew how to do. Instead of changing our lifestyles to suit the situation, we changed the situation to fit our lifestyles. Europians evolved that way because our ancestors had to adapt during the great migrations into the northern latitudes.

Wooly Mammoths wouldn't last very long in a land of Europian descendants, as you can guess from some of the comments. My first thought was how much jerky could you get from one?

ET,
Thank you for being the reasonable one.

Fred2,
Please read Guns, Germs and Steel. I think a little reading will make you second guess your ill formed prejudices.
-----------

So what's the deal with the Luddites? Why is modern science so scary that you need to flash your guns on a blog? I hope you will see the positive in this when this technology replaces your kidney, or aids in the development of a cure for cancer.

Hey Jon. It was guns that made science possible. It was guns that made society safe. Wake up man.

Jon, when the technology creates a cure for cancer, I will celebrate it and I'm sure millions of other people will too.
When the technology is being used for some absurd and grandiose goal of bringing back to life a long-extinct animal that can easily and cheaply be reproduced by tossing one of Cher's wigs on an elephant, I will laugh at barbecue and hunting comments, and you should too. After all, what kind of hunting license would you need for a mammoth?

Aawww sheesh, just when I mastered the 'bear wonders into my flower garden' thingy this summer, now I have to learn the big wooley thingy too?

Luckily the bear was younger and faster than I am old, and he ran first - of course my blood-curdling yell scared the hell of both of us.
I didn't know that I could yell like that.

If you don't mind Alex, I'll pass on the wooley guy.

"They hunted a form of horse to extinction too"

A sure cure for extinction. Start eating them!

Once they're on our menu, there will be farms and breeding programs to ensure a steady and inexpensive supply.

The "McT-Rex"(c) could have saved the dinosaurs...