Is it possible to spear hunt a grizzly bear?

You've missed one thing in your original questions, and that is the fact that early man hunted game with spears in groups.

They basically bled the animal to death and killed it when it collapsed.

Hardly considered a humane kill nowadays.
 
Aside from being illegal everywhere(all jurisdictions have rules about what can be used for hunting in the hunting regs), no outfitter would ever allow you to use a spear for humane and liability reasons.
Yogi can move faster than you can. You'd last a minute or less.
Anyway, a javelin is for throwing in battle. Isn't a hunting tool and never was. A spear is a stabbing tool. Doesn't get thrown. And you have to get really close to use one.
"...These warriors didn't seem to care about..." They also had no hunting regs or especially long lives.
 
ALL of the experts who study our stone age ancestors report the same things, that their lives were hard, dangerous, and fairly short.
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Pretty much you could say that about most western societies more than 300 or 400 years ago and many much more recently.

Actually, early hunters had pretty good lives, not terribly hard, danger levels are debatable, and not short lives. As a zooarchaeologist, I studied paleodiets for over 25 years, working with physical anthropologist and paleobotanists.

By and large, hunter-gatherers were healthier, worked less, and had comparable or longer lives than their modern American colonists or western industrial revolution counterparts.

It is all rather relative. There lives may have been very different, but not necessarily worse or more dangerous. It sort of averages out when you think about it. You could die from being killed by a bear or auroch as a stone-aged hunter and gatherer or by industrial accidents, poison, and/or poor safety conditions of the industrial revolution. Either way, you were living into your mid 30s on average, assuming you survived the high infant mortality rates. The difference is that the stone-aged hunter and gatherer was probably working less than 30 hours a week at survival whereas factory workers often worked 12 hours a day or more, 6 or 7 days per week during the IR. Never mind the dangers of the 1700s and 1800s fishing industry folks.

When it came to hunting large game, prehistorically, as far as we know, in most areas it is not the major source of regular food, but the occasional source. Part or how people minimize risk is by not hunting game that will kill them as readily. There is a reason why, for example, there are often plenty of deer, rabbits, rodents, etc. in the middens of prehistoric Native Plains villages. Also, smaller game may be more readily available on a daily basis than large game. Studies of historic, technologically primitive groups have shown that the procurement of big game also often corresponds with particular types of ceremony and rights of passage.

I had a chance to spend time with Richard Gould back in the 90s. He spent a lot of time with Australian Aborigines. One of the stories he recounted was a hoot. As a very sexually stratified society, the men hunted and the women and younger children gathered. The men "hunted" many days, but often came back empty-handed. The women gathered plants and killed lizards, snakes, insects, and small game as encountered. Gould noted how most of the game was being procured by women and so he went hunting with the men...who often went as far as the first shady place out of sight of the women and spent the day in the shade, chatting, smoking, and resting. Then the men returned home at the end of the day, noting they had seen nothing. We the women reported seeing game, the men would then sometimes go after it. So from a risk perspective, the men reduced their risk of dealing with larger game by engaging in infrequent actual hunts and letting the women do much of their scouting for them.

In many aboriginal societies around the world, learning to be a hunter by boys meant procuring small game on a regular basis. It is the small game brought in by young boys that often was what was cooked at the end of the evening on a daily basis.

New World Clovis hunters didn't just go after mammoth and other megafauna all the time. People, even prehisoric people, were not dummies. They utilized what they could when they could (with the possible exception of food taboos). Megafauna was game sometimes utilized when it was thought possible, practical, necessarily, or out of ceremonial or traditional reasons.
 
Drifting into atlatls:

http://waa.basketmakeratlatl.com/?page_id=177

"Early people in the Americas used atlatls to hunt the Pleistocene “megafauna” like mammoths and mastodons some 11,000 years B.C. Much later, a variety of atlatl types were in use in different part of North America. Many of the large stone projectile points found in American sites were used with atlatl darts, and are not “arrowheads.” The bow and arrow began replacing the atlatl around 1000 B.C., but atlatls continued to be used alongside bows into modern times in some areas, most notably Mexico and the Arctic."

Modern times = 1500s AD.
 
New World Clovis hunters didn't just go after mammoth and other megafauna all the time. People, even prehisoric people, were not dummies. They utilized what they could when they could (with the possible exception of food taboos). Megafauna was game sometimes utilized when it was thought possible, practical, necessarily, or out of ceremonial or traditional reasons.
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When you think about it, prehistoric people may well have been on average more intelligent than modern people, because intelligence was a major factor in their evolution. The only reason humans evolved to be as smart as we are is because it was the smarter people who were surviving and reproducing. So natural selection was not favoring the dumb people.
 
Drifting into atlatls:

http://waa.basketmakeratlatl.com/?page_id=177

"Early people in the Americas used atlatls to hunt the Pleistocene “megafauna” like mammoths and mastodons some 11,000 years B.C. Much later, a variety of atlatl types were in use in different part of North America. Many of the large stone projectile points found in American sites were used with atlatl darts, and are not “arrowheads.” The bow and arrow began replacing the atlatl around 1000 B.C., but atlatls continued to be used alongside bows into modern times in some areas, most notably Mexico and the Arctic."

Modern times = 1500s AD.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link.
 
Anthony Hopkins killed a grizzly with a spear in "The Edge".....but Hollywood bears are treated humanely and never abused while filming, its in their contract.

Anthony-Hopkins-Bart-the-Bear-in-The-Edge-300x225.jpg


Seriously, many hunters have been killed by the bear they killed....bears heart rate is about 25 beats per minute, this is how bears Hy-brenate over the winter months with a slow metabolism. Therefore by the time the bear looses enough blood to go into shock, it's had more than enough time to attack their killer and work them over. While a bullet delivers massive tissue damage, spear or blade wound require loss of blood to end the bears life. I'm sure a spear would do the job on a bear....but it won't be quick.
 
Capstick

Read Peter Capstick's story about hunting Cape Buffalo with a spear.
In Death in the Silent Places, page 251 and on.
Pete
 
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