Elephant Hunters or Daring Plant Collectors?

中美洲的生态环境塑造了早期以小动物狩猎和植物采集为主要生业的人类社会，相对于北美地区以大型动物狩猎为主要生业的社会。或许可以合理地推测，之所以中美而不是北美成为新大陆的农业起源地乃至于后来文明中心与早期人类的主要生业有关，当然安第斯地区则走上了一种完全不同的模式。
Cave sites in the Tehuacan Valley to the southeast of the Basin of Mexico and in Tamaulipas, far to the north, have produced approximately contem- porary remains in the form of somewhat nondescript collections of scrapers, flakes, and chips. Inasmuch as the rest of the Tehuacan and Tamaulipas sequences show definite and increasing reliance on small animals and plant gathering, MacNeish has suggested that big game hunting as a way of life never existed in the form that it did on the North American Great Plains. Indeed, MacNeish has said that if a man killed a mammoth in central Mexico, he probably never stopped talking about it. The view of Mesoamerican Lithic-stage people as engaging in plant gathering and small animal hunting and only occasionally and opportunistically hunting big game accords with the geographical and faunal evidence. As ecologically favorable as it was for many purposes, Mesoamerica did not have the vast and grassy plains to support large numbers of Pleistocene megafauna. Mammoths and other large game animals did occur, of course, but their numbers were small, and the kinds of specializations in meat eating and hunting that parallel the European Ice Age cultures were simply not possible