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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Extinctions_Africa_Austrailia_NAmerica_Madagascar.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Ex

by myshpa 3y ago

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Extinctions_Africa_Austrailia_NAmerica_Madagascar.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Extincti... Humans were the reason, on all continents. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline "By around 10,000 years ago we see a huge decline of wild mammals. It’s hard to give a precise estimate of the size of these losses millennia ago, but they were large: likely in the range of 25% to 50%." "It wasn’t just that we lost a lot of mammals. It was almost exclusively the world’s largest mammals that vanished. This big decline of mammals is referred to as the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction (QME). The QME led to the extinction of more than 178 of the world’s large mammals (‘megafauna’)." We lost the biggest animals because those were the ones we hunted. If the reason were to be the fire (which sounds ridiculous), it would have caused the extinction of mammals of all sizes, not just the largest ones.

ceejayoz 3y ago
> Humans were the reason, on all continents. The article doesn't disagree, saying both "increased fire activity spurred by people" and "Dr. Dunn emphasized that this pattern could not account for the notable disappearance of large mammals elsewhere in the world at the end of the last ice age". > If the reason were to be the fire (which sounds ridiculous), it would have caused the extinction of mammals of all sizes, not just the largest ones. No, not necessarily. A small animal can retreat into a burrow an elephant-sized one cannot. They also breed faster afterwards, allowing their populations to recover more readily.
codexb 3y ago
The mass extinction of large megafauna, all around the world, at roughly the same time, isn't explained by humans (see woolly mammoths). There's far more evidence that it was driven by climate change as the world quickly exited the last glacial maximum.
- myshpa 3y ago
  https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/08/us/woolly-mammoths-death-scn-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/08/us/woolly-mammoths-death-... Last mammoths died 4000 years ago, and they might have even lived longer, if short-term events hadn’t tainted their water and drained their food supply. It wasn't climate change that killed off the mammoths; it was humans. https://www.google.com/search?q=mammoth+house&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=mammoth+house&tbm=isch We ate them all. It was only when there were no big animals left to hunt that we invented agriculture.
  - codexb 3y ago
    And yet, for some reason, ancient humans decided not to eat all the elephants. No, it was climate change. The last, small population of mammoths that survived until 4000 years ago on Wrangel Island never came in contact with humans. They died because they were ill suited for the climate they lived in.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      Humans got rid of plenty of elephants. "Both" is likely the answer in all of these extinction events. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7548514 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7548514 > One million years ago, elephants and their cousins roamed the five major continents of the earth. Then humans came along. Today elephants can be found only in portions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. > The two most argued hypotheses for their decline are climatic changes and over-hunting by humans. A recent archaeological expedition dug up information that may support the latter. > Exploring 41 sites ranging from 1.8 million to 10,000 years old, Todd Surovell of the University of Wyoming found that interactions between humans and elephants matched up with successive waves of human population expansion. As the human populations in those sites continued to grow, the number of elephants shrank and, in some sites, disappeared.
    - myshpa 3y ago
      > ancient humans decided not to eat all the elephants Who knows why? Larger size, slower reproductive rates, and adaptations to colder climates? Maybe elephants were more socially organized and were harder to hunt? Maybe their habitats were not so densely populated by humans? We can only speculate. > No, it was climate change. While climate change certainly played a role, it's undeniable that the QME would not have been as extensive if it weren't for human involvement. > never came in contact with humans That's not clear, iirc.
- user_ 3y ago
  Climate change potentially caused by catastrophic comet impacts.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  It’s both. Human populations were growing rapidly and simultaneously the period from 50000-10000 was the end of the last ice age So the going theory is that the original areas of climate for which mega fauna were most populous, was effectively reduced increasingly over time as a result of warming, which humans were able to capitalize on to the point where we kind of “finished the job.” This is effectively, how we see extinction patterns around the globe. Whereas humans aren’t necessarily the primary or only cause, but they do make a big enough exogenous impact to cause a collapse.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    How big of a population are we talking here
    - myshpa 3y ago
      https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline "What’s most shocking is how few humans were responsible for this large-scale destruction of wildlife. There were likely fewer than 5 million people in the world. Around half the population of London today."
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Well the estimates are kind of all over the place but basically growing from ~1M - 15M over the course of 40000 years, before the Neolithic explosion
- stonetrw 3y ago
  It seems somewhat incredible that mega fauna survived the previous two dozen or so ice ages just fine then went extinct as soon as humans figured out how to live in huts.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Something so innocuous turning catastrophic... But don't worry guys AI will totally 100% be aligned with not fucking humanity over.
- stubish 3y ago
  Given historical and prehistorical evidence, I think it fair to say that even in the cases where humans were not responsible, it was not through lack of trying. Human societies gorged themselves until they had to adapt to scarcity, at which point I think we started developing concepts like living in harmony with nature, agriculture and land management.
jlawson 3y ago
[flagged]
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > Expect to see more grasping at straws to try to blame climate change or whatever. It's grasping at straws to propose that the end of an ice age might involve some climate change? Human predation certainly played a role, but pretending the ice caps melting can't have is... something.
BurningFrog 3y ago
I note that the megafauna extinction was done by people of all races and creeds, long before capitalism existed.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  This, I think, is part of the controversy. In Australia there's this "noble savage in tune with their environment" thing about the Indigenous people; that they are custodians of the land and live in harmony with nature. The idea that they are also responsible for the mass extinction of the megafauna is incompatible with this idea, and therefore unacceptable.
  - defrost 3y ago
    I've been in Australia 60 odd years, frequently in contact with anthropologists in the Kimberley and PNG. The noble savage trope died out years ago - haven't seen much of that in any serious circles since the back to nature french quasi-anthro types were grooving to La Vallée by Barbet Schroeder (with the Pink Floyd soundtrack). > The idea that they are also responsible for the mass extinction of the megafauna is .. pretty hard to land, save for the possibility of a small number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna Head on down to "Causes of extinction" and read carefully, there are a lot of some's. New evidence based on accurate optically stimulated luminescence and uranium-thorium dating of megafaunal remains suggests that humans were the ultimate cause of the extinction for some of the megafauna in Australia. The evidence we have (sure, there may be unknowns) is that the bulk of the megafauna were dwindling as a result of the environmental changes following the end of glaciation. Humans in Australia appear to be responsible for, at most, the final death blow to a few of the species that were on their way out already. If you have evidence to the contrary I'd gladly accept it.
    - marcus_holmes 3y ago
      No evidence, but anecdata. Glad to hear it isn't taken seriously by actual anthropologists. Thanks for the info :)
lumost 3y ago
Would be interesting if the myth of Dragons breathing fire was because we used fire to kill the largest/scariest megafauna.
- dagaci 3y ago
  We probably used fire to cook them with, and probably cause a lot of accidental fires in the process ;) Also bare in mind that except for africa those megafauna would have been relatively tame and way too unsuspecting of meat eating humans.
  - Gene_Parmesan 3y ago
    There's a lot of theorizing that early sapiens intentionally set fires to clear thick, impassable forests and kill game in the process. The cleared areas would make post-fire hunting easier as well.
    - asdff 3y ago
      This is still practiced to an extent by the Aboriginal Australians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fire_(Noongar_fire_type) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fire_(Noongar_fire_type)
    - defrost 3y ago
      > thick impassable forests Trad burning in Australia has largely been to cool burn undergrowth in the forest areas (relatively small land area) and to patch burn open grass lands (majority of area) eg: https://youtu.be/wZL5rITqpwU?t=208 https://youtu.be/wZL5rITqpwU?t=208
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sampo 3y ago
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Extinctions_Africa_Austrailia_NAmerica_Madagascar.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Extincti... There are several findings of humans being present in North America much earlier than 13 000 years ego. One recent paper in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586 A longer list in a thread 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34525911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34525911
Grubbo 3y ago
Doesn't explain the ones frozen in place still in the process of chewing grass.
Reason077 3y ago
> "Humans were the reason, on all continents." Except the numbers don't really stack up. 10-15k years ago the entire global population of humans was, at best, a few million. And a single megafauna kill would produce enough meat to feed an entire community for weeks. Humans would have had to have been extremely bloodthirsty and systematic in their slaughter, and must have been wasting enormous quantities of meat. Also, the regions where some megafauna species survive into modern times (ie: Africa and South Asia) were where most of the humans lived. Wouldn't we expect those species to have gone extinct too? It's certainly possible that humans helped finish off megafauna populations that were already scattered, distressed, and in decline. But it's unlikely that we were the primary or only cause. > "We lost the biggest animals because those were the ones we hunted." There's plenty of evidence that ancient humans hunted animals of all sizes. Why would we only go after megafauna as they became rarer and rarer? Instead of smaller species that were far more numerous and accessible?
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  > And a single megafauna kill would produce enough meat to feed an entire community for weeks. Meat spoils in warm weather within days. Weeks would be assuming they had refrigeration. We're not sure when the practice of curing and drying meat started, and if they had not been practicing that... then it would be a megafauna every few days.

by myshpa 3y ago

ceejayoz 3y ago

> Humans were the reason, on all continents. The article doesn't disagree, saying both "increased fire activity spurred by people" and "Dr. Dunn emphasized that this pattern could not account for the notable disappearance of large mammals elsewhere in the world at the end of the last ice age". > If the reason were to be the fire (which sounds ridiculous), it would have caused the extinction of mammals of all sizes, not just the largest ones. No, not necessarily. A small animal can retreat into a burrow an elephant-sized one cannot. They also breed faster afterwards, allowing their populations to recover more readily.

codexb 3y ago

The mass extinction of large megafauna, all around the world, at roughly the same time, isn't explained by humans (see woolly mammoths). There's far more evidence that it was driven by climate change as the world quickly exited the last glacial maximum.

myshpa 3y ago
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/08/us/woolly-mammoths-death-scn-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/08/us/woolly-mammoths-death-... Last mammoths died 4000 years ago, and they might have even lived longer, if short-term events hadn’t tainted their water and drained their food supply. It wasn't climate change that killed off the mammoths; it was humans. https://www.google.com/search?q=mammoth+house&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=mammoth+house&tbm=isch We ate them all. It was only when there were no big animals left to hunt that we invented agriculture.
- codexb 3y ago
  And yet, for some reason, ancient humans decided not to eat all the elephants. No, it was climate change. The last, small population of mammoths that survived until 4000 years ago on Wrangel Island never came in contact with humans. They died because they were ill suited for the climate they lived in.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Humans got rid of plenty of elephants. "Both" is likely the answer in all of these extinction events. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7548514 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7548514 > One million years ago, elephants and their cousins roamed the five major continents of the earth. Then humans came along. Today elephants can be found only in portions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. > The two most argued hypotheses for their decline are climatic changes and over-hunting by humans. A recent archaeological expedition dug up information that may support the latter. > Exploring 41 sites ranging from 1.8 million to 10,000 years old, Todd Surovell of the University of Wyoming found that interactions between humans and elephants matched up with successive waves of human population expansion. As the human populations in those sites continued to grow, the number of elephants shrank and, in some sites, disappeared.
  - myshpa 3y ago
    > ancient humans decided not to eat all the elephants Who knows why? Larger size, slower reproductive rates, and adaptations to colder climates? Maybe elephants were more socially organized and were harder to hunt? Maybe their habitats were not so densely populated by humans? We can only speculate. > No, it was climate change. While climate change certainly played a role, it's undeniable that the QME would not have been as extensive if it weren't for human involvement. > never came in contact with humans That's not clear, iirc.
user_ 3y ago
Climate change potentially caused by catastrophic comet impacts.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
It’s both. Human populations were growing rapidly and simultaneously the period from 50000-10000 was the end of the last ice age So the going theory is that the original areas of climate for which mega fauna were most populous, was effectively reduced increasingly over time as a result of warming, which humans were able to capitalize on to the point where we kind of “finished the job.” This is effectively, how we see extinction patterns around the globe. Whereas humans aren’t necessarily the primary or only cause, but they do make a big enough exogenous impact to cause a collapse.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  How big of a population are we talking here
  - myshpa 3y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline "What’s most shocking is how few humans were responsible for this large-scale destruction of wildlife. There were likely fewer than 5 million people in the world. Around half the population of London today."
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Well the estimates are kind of all over the place but basically growing from ~1M - 15M over the course of 40000 years, before the Neolithic explosion
stonetrw 3y ago
It seems somewhat incredible that mega fauna survived the previous two dozen or so ice ages just fine then went extinct as soon as humans figured out how to live in huts.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Something so innocuous turning catastrophic... But don't worry guys AI will totally 100% be aligned with not fucking humanity over.
stubish 3y ago
Given historical and prehistorical evidence, I think it fair to say that even in the cases where humans were not responsible, it was not through lack of trying. Human societies gorged themselves until they had to adapt to scarcity, at which point I think we started developing concepts like living in harmony with nature, agriculture and land management.

jlawson 3y ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 3y ago
> Expect to see more grasping at straws to try to blame climate change or whatever. It's grasping at straws to propose that the end of an ice age might involve some climate change? Human predation certainly played a role, but pretending the ice caps melting can't have is... something.

BurningFrog 3y ago

I note that the megafauna extinction was done by people of all races and creeds, long before capitalism existed.

marcus_holmes 3y ago
This, I think, is part of the controversy. In Australia there's this "noble savage in tune with their environment" thing about the Indigenous people; that they are custodians of the land and live in harmony with nature. The idea that they are also responsible for the mass extinction of the megafauna is incompatible with this idea, and therefore unacceptable.
- defrost 3y ago
  I've been in Australia 60 odd years, frequently in contact with anthropologists in the Kimberley and PNG. The noble savage trope died out years ago - haven't seen much of that in any serious circles since the back to nature french quasi-anthro types were grooving to La Vallée by Barbet Schroeder (with the Pink Floyd soundtrack). > The idea that they are also responsible for the mass extinction of the megafauna is .. pretty hard to land, save for the possibility of a small number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna Head on down to "Causes of extinction" and read carefully, there are a lot of some's. New evidence based on accurate optically stimulated luminescence and uranium-thorium dating of megafaunal remains suggests that humans were the ultimate cause of the extinction for some of the megafauna in Australia. The evidence we have (sure, there may be unknowns) is that the bulk of the megafauna were dwindling as a result of the environmental changes following the end of glaciation. Humans in Australia appear to be responsible for, at most, the final death blow to a few of the species that were on their way out already. If you have evidence to the contrary I'd gladly accept it.
  - marcus_holmes 3y ago
    No evidence, but anecdata. Glad to hear it isn't taken seriously by actual anthropologists. Thanks for the info :)

lumost 3y ago

Would be interesting if the myth of Dragons breathing fire was because we used fire to kill the largest/scariest megafauna.

dagaci 3y ago
We probably used fire to cook them with, and probably cause a lot of accidental fires in the process ;) Also bare in mind that except for africa those megafauna would have been relatively tame and way too unsuspecting of meat eating humans.
- Gene_Parmesan 3y ago
  There's a lot of theorizing that early sapiens intentionally set fires to clear thick, impassable forests and kill game in the process. The cleared areas would make post-fire hunting easier as well.
  - asdff 3y ago
    This is still practiced to an extent by the Aboriginal Australians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fire_(Noongar_fire_type) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fire_(Noongar_fire_type)
  - defrost 3y ago
    > thick impassable forests Trad burning in Australia has largely been to cool burn undergrowth in the forest areas (relatively small land area) and to patch burn open grass lands (majority of area) eg: https://youtu.be/wZL5rITqpwU?t=208 https://youtu.be/wZL5rITqpwU?t=208

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sampo 3y ago

> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Extinctions_Africa_Austrailia_NAmerica_Madagascar.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Extincti... There are several findings of humans being present in North America much earlier than 13 000 years ego. One recent paper in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586 A longer list in a thread 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34525911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34525911

Grubbo 3y ago

Doesn't explain the ones frozen in place still in the process of chewing grass.

Reason077 3y ago

> "Humans were the reason, on all continents." Except the numbers don't really stack up. 10-15k years ago the entire global population of humans was, at best, a few million. And a single megafauna kill would produce enough meat to feed an entire community for weeks. Humans would have had to have been extremely bloodthirsty and systematic in their slaughter, and must have been wasting enormous quantities of meat. Also, the regions where some megafauna species survive into modern times (ie: Africa and South Asia) were where most of the humans lived. Wouldn't we expect those species to have gone extinct too? It's certainly possible that humans helped finish off megafauna populations that were already scattered, distressed, and in decline. But it's unlikely that we were the primary or only cause. > "We lost the biggest animals because those were the ones we hunted." There's plenty of evidence that ancient humans hunted animals of all sizes. Why would we only go after megafauna as they became rarer and rarer? Instead of smaller species that were far more numerous and accessible?

deafpolygon 3y ago
> And a single megafauna kill would produce enough meat to feed an entire community for weeks. Meat spoils in warm weather within days. Weeks would be assuming they had refrigeration. We're not sure when the practice of curing and drying meat started, and if they had not been practicing that... then it would be a megafauna every few days.