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Maybe agriculture didn’t become important to people until large mammals were hunted into extinction and having to rely on smaller game opened an opportunity for
by mc32 3y ago
Maybe agriculture didn’t become important to people until large mammals were hunted into extinction and having to rely on smaller game opened an opportunity for agriculture and animal domestication and husbandry.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThat’s correct based on modern anthropological conclusions My hypothesis takes that further and shows that it was the biggest cultural change in human history creating the concept of “capital” and is now counter productive to the long term success of humanity https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
- angiosperm 3y agoHuman-caused extinction is not correct, based on modern archaeological evidence.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoWho is claiming that? Consensus seems to be that it’s combinatory between loss of habitats from warming and over consumption
- angiosperm 3y agoAsk literally any working North American archaeologist. If you are getting your background from YT vids, I recommend Nathanael Fossaaen for broad coverage. Hunting to extinction is a holdover from "Clovis First" doctrine.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoWe agree here, what’s with the hostility? Stop with the assumptions
- angiosperm 3y agoIt was not, in fact, "loss of habitats ... and overconsumption". It was, in fact, the comet strike. Habitat increased throughout the period that glaciers were melting, from 20kya to 8kya, opening up basically all of Canada.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoOhhh sure. That’s taken into account for in acceleration, however megafauna extinction events start 50kya and are confidently correlated with human population increases. This paper discusses YD in the all cause: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07897-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07897-1
- angiosperm 3y agoThat paper wholly fails to even mention the comet strike, except a single references entry to a 2007 paper. Its heavy reliance on Todd Surovell, a Clovis-first holdout, tells us all we need to know. We have no reliable data about human population levels in North America, so nothing to correlate to extinctions.
- angiosperm 3y agoLarge mammals were not, in fact, hunted to extinction. Archaeologists have understood this since the '90s, although Wikipedia has still not caught up. The North American megafauna, 30+ genera strong, were wiped out by the end-Pleistocene comet strike that caused continent-wide wildfires 12,800 years ago, as recorded in Antarctic and Greenland ice cores. This comet strike coincided with the beginning of the Younger Dryas cold spell, and is suspected of causing it. North America at the time boasted giant sloths, mastodons, mammoths, dire wolves, camels, horses, saber-tooth cats, and beavers, bison and bears much larger than what is left. Their fossils mostly appear right up to the continent-wide black mat of platinum-enriched soot, and not above it. So those remaining of people who had been making Clovis spear points were obliged to shift to hunting the smaller game that remained, and made the smaller Folsom and other projectile point styles after. The continent-wide uniformity of Clovis points before the strike may have been a consequence of their status as trade goods, where deviation would reduce their value. After, the trade networks may have been disrupted, or maybe smaller points were easier to make, so were less valuable to trade. Most questions will probably never be answered.
- amatic 3y agoCould you share some references, like a recent review or consensus? I've seen different takes on the causes of megafauna extinction, and one story is that the extinction lines up pretty well with the arrival of humans to North America. But recent evidence seems to put the arrival of humans to a few thousand years before the Younger Dryas?
- angiosperm 3y agoWe know there were modern humans in North America 22,000+ years ago. So did hunters go along fine for 9000 years with no impact, and then suddenly, at one stroke, wipe out everything they depended on? It never made any sense even before we knew about the comet strike or earlier arrival. We had lions in Europe right up until the Roman circuses, and still have them and elephants in Africa, and tigers and elephants in India. There is a good survey article on the status of the end-Pleistocene comet strike by Martin Sweatman. Follow references from there to Antarctic ice cores. (Boslough and Holliday have a great deal to be ashamed of.)
- Erratic6576 3y agoMaybe agriculture didn’t become important until the Meteorite blast 10,000 years ago