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One thing we always see when a mass extinction happens is that mega fauna goes first. Large animals can't hide, unlike rat sized ones. Currently so much of the
by thrown_22 5y ago
One thing we always see when a mass extinction happens is that mega fauna goes first. Large animals can't hide, unlike rat sized ones. Currently so much of the mega fauna outside of Africa has disappeared that we don't even think most continents had any: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Megafaunal_mass_extinctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Megafaunal_mass_exti...
That would suggest we're 10,000 years into one, rather than being at the early stages of it.
- pvg 5y ago10k years is not a lot of geological time so even if true, that could still well be in the early stages of a mass extinction.
- darkmarmot 5y agoWhen humans killed off most of the megafauna, it caused cascading extincations. Dire wolves went extinct with nothing to eat. The Osage orange tree nearly went extinct (down to one very small area); it's believed that were spread by Giant Ground Sloth droppings. Tons of dependent plants and animals likely vanished from our "natural" landscape without ever having been recorded.
- blueprint 5y agowhat megafauna did humans kill off, which you're referring to? there are rumblings that the ~10k year ago megafauna die off was far too rapid to have been done by relatively unsophisticated humans and is likely to have been caused by a comet fragment impact or similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
- slater 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Timing_and_possible_causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Timing_and_possible_... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- meristohm 5y agoUnsophisticated humans? We haven’t changed much in the last 50,000 years, from what I remember from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. My feeling is that our collective ancestors were creative, intellectual, observant, and all the other positive descriptions we might aspire to, along with being brutal killers fighting to survive. In the span of a couple hundred years we’ve engineered global climate change—-that’s impressive and disheartening, and adopting more of the leave-less-trace existence of our ancestors might be prudent.
- kuhewa 5y ago> We haven’t changed much in the last 50,000 years Genetically, not too much. In terms of population density and technology, we absolutely have changed, and both are relevant to our ability to clear a continent of dozens of species of animals at a rapid rate.
- blueprint 5y agotechnologically unsophisticated. no guns. hard (or impossible) for them to have wiped out a continent of megafauna in the timespans that had previously been suggested.
- robbedpeter 5y agoHumans being the cause is speculation, not fact. It's worth looking into the alternative theories and making your own judgment based on available evidence.
- thrown_22 5y agoThe alternative is that all mega fauna survived a dozen ice ages over the last 5 million years, only for all of them to go extinct when fully modern humans finally invent agriculture by sheer coincidence.
- cultofmetatron 5y ago> Why is Africa, the place where humans have been the longest, teeming with megafauna? Because they evolved with us and evolved to respect the threat we pose.
- meristohm 5y agoYeah, and I think this is noted in The Old Way, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
- oh_sigh 5y agoWhy is Africa, the place where humans have been the longest, teeming with megafauna relative to the rest of the world? Why did megafauna die out in regions where there was little to no human presence? Maybe the environmental conditions that allowed for humans to invent agriculture also spelled doom for the megafauna. If the world of relevant scientists agree that this is an open problem, it doesn't make sense to just pretend like we know the answer because it suits us in whatever manner. The fact is: We don't know what killed off the megafauna.
- colordrops 5y agoWe do in some cases though. The bison in the US were definitely killed off by European settlers. Rhinos in Africa were killed off for asian medicinal customers.
- prescriptivist 5y agoThe blitzkrieg hypothesis is hardly settled science. Don't know why you are so confident this is what happened.
- throwanem 5y agoYes, that's what we always see, because megafauna are highly obvious in the fossil record. Tiny or especially soft-bodied invertebrates maybe not so much, and I'd hesitate to assume past mass extinctions provide too precise a model for one taking place in the present day. After all, there's nothing in the fossil record to suggest what a mass extinction might look like like in an environment containing modern humanity, too.
- 37 5y agoSo how long until it becomes a REAL problem for humanity? A couple thousand years? (if we are already 10k years in)