Also from Energy and Civilization:
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump near Fort Mcleod, Alberta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the more spectacular sites of this inventive hunting strategy, which was used at the site for about 5,700 years. “To start the hunt young men would entice the herd to follow them by imitating the bleating of a lost calf. As the buffalo moved closer to the drive lanes (long lines of stone cairns were built to help the hunters direct the buffalo to the cliff kill site), the hunters would circle behind and upwind of the herd and scare the animals by shouting and waving robes and stampeded the herd over the cliff (UNESCO 2015a). The net energy return in animal protein and fat was high. Late Pleistocene hunters may have become so skillful that many students of the Quaternary era concluded that hunting was largely (even completely) responsible for a relatively rapid disappearance of the late Paleolithic megafauna, animals with a body mass greater than 50 kg (Martin 1958, 2005; Fiedel and Haynes 2004), but the verdict remains uncertain (box 2.4).
Wow.