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> It seems to me that ecological pressure from Humans is the parsimonious explanation. Humans are very crafty at using the whole animal so the processing of a

> It seems to me that ecological pressure from Humans is the parsimonious explanation. Humans are very crafty at using the whole animal so the processing of a carcass tends to leave traces all over a settlement wherever bits get used (bone tools and whatnot). Hunting big and necessarily rare game has a worse risk/reward tradeoff and is less efficient than optimizing for shaking an antelope/deer/elk on the regular. The environment was being turned upside down in all sorts of places at the end of the last ice age. Humans in many cases where the did hunt things only accelerated the inevitable by a few thousand years which sounds like a lot but is the blink of an eye in terms of evolution. Basically unless humans left evidence indicating they habitually hunted these animals it's a pretty fair bet they did so only in an occasional opportunistic manner. "But the cave art" you say? Nobody posts the 100th medium sized whitetail doe they got that year on social. But if me and the boys get capitalize on a once or twice in a career opportunity to bag a rhino you can bet that mofo is going on the 'gram. Simply put, rare and exceptional events get proportionately more documentation effort put into them. If you "read the docs" that any civilization has left important people and exceptional events dominate when in reality the bulk of the labor was spent on food shelter and clothing. >The last major landmasses to be settled by humans were Madagascar and New Zealand... Comparing the ecological impact of the relatively population dense cultures that settled these islands to the ecological impact of nomadic neolithic people (who would have hunted steppe mammals) is like comparing a skid steer to a mining shovel. Furthermore, islands tend to exacerbate the impact because they're a relatively closed system compared to the mainland where if you can't find enough to hunt and gather you pack up and move.

AbrahamParangi 5y ago
The quaternary extinctions start to occur in Australia around ~60k years ago, South America ~15k years ago, Madagascar ~1k years ago, and New Zealand ~700 years ago. These numbers are very shortly after when humans first show up in each place. While climate change probably bears some of the blame, massive climate change is actually a regular feature of the last 2.5 million years. As the earth passes through glacial and interglacial phases, the temperature varies by as much as 10°C. The biggest change in the past cycle is us, humans, who now constitute some 36% of mammal biomass. I suggest that extrapolating backwards from the present state, as well as from recent first-colonization events, we should assume that ecological pressure from humans -including predation, displacement, and disruption of habitat and food webs- is the principle factor.
mc32 5y ago
I don’t think that people back then had the same narrative needs as we do. One could just as well speculate that what they recorded were things important to them. If wheat or papyrus or irrigation or agriculture were important to them, they might record those things. But also might record great threats to survival like pests or floods or drought. You’re take would discount people in far northern latitudes hunting whales because there are easier prey.
slipframe 5y ago
> Humans are very crafty at using the whole animal so the processing of a carcass tends to leave traces all over a settlement wherever bits get used (bone tools and whatnot). Yeah, about that... > Ice Age hunter-gatherers, foraging the bone-chilling, unforgiving steppes of what today is Russia, somehow completed a remarkable construction project: a 40-foot-wide, circular structure made from the skulls, skeletons and tusks of more than 60 woolly mammoths. > Archaeologists have unearthed about 70 mammoth-bone structures across Eastern Europe. But this one is the oldest on the Russian plain thought to be made by modern humans. Most of the previously identified structures were small, leading researchers to conclude they were most likely used as winter dwellings on a nearly treeless landscape. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/science/mammoth-bones-circle.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/science/mammoth-bones-cir...

AbrahamParangi 5y ago

The quaternary extinctions start to occur in Australia around ~60k years ago, South America ~15k years ago, Madagascar ~1k years ago, and New Zealand ~700 years ago. These numbers are very shortly after when humans first show up in each place. While climate change probably bears some of the blame, massive climate change is actually a regular feature of the last 2.5 million years. As the earth passes through glacial and interglacial phases, the temperature varies by as much as 10°C. The biggest change in the past cycle is us, humans, who now constitute some 36% of mammal biomass. I suggest that extrapolating backwards from the present state, as well as from recent first-colonization events, we should assume that ecological pressure from humans -including predation, displacement, and disruption of habitat and food webs- is the principle factor.

mc32 5y ago

I don’t think that people back then had the same narrative needs as we do. One could just as well speculate that what they recorded were things important to them. If wheat or papyrus or irrigation or agriculture were important to them, they might record those things. But also might record great threats to survival like pests or floods or drought. You’re take would discount people in far northern latitudes hunting whales because there are easier prey.

slipframe 5y ago

> Humans are very crafty at using the whole animal so the processing of a carcass tends to leave traces all over a settlement wherever bits get used (bone tools and whatnot). Yeah, about that... > Ice Age hunter-gatherers, foraging the bone-chilling, unforgiving steppes of what today is Russia, somehow completed a remarkable construction project: a 40-foot-wide, circular structure made from the skulls, skeletons and tusks of more than 60 woolly mammoths. > Archaeologists have unearthed about 70 mammoth-bone structures across Eastern Europe. But this one is the oldest on the Russian plain thought to be made by modern humans. Most of the previously identified structures were small, leading researchers to conclude they were most likely used as winter dwellings on a nearly treeless landscape. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/science/mammoth-bones-circle.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/science/mammoth-bones-cir...