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It's the same story in Australia. Several large slow creatures that disappeared shortly after the arrival of humans. I think trying to pin the blame solely on t

It's the same story in Australia. Several large slow creatures that disappeared shortly after the arrival of humans. I think trying to pin the blame solely on the weather is simply because it's much more in sync with the "stewards and custodians of the land" narrative that is currently so fashionable.

sudofail 2y ago
Or simply because we don't have evidance of Homo Sapiens in the Americas until ~20k years ago, 30k years after megafuana extinction.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  There were wooly mammoths alive in 2000 BC, 600 years after the Great Pyramid was built. There is evidence of humans and mammoths being in north America together. https://www.livescience.com/woolly-mammoths-in-north-america-longer https://www.livescience.com/woolly-mammoths-in-north-america...
- mkl 2y ago
  The extinction doesn't seem to have happened 50k years ago in North America. That seems to have been made up by whoever wrote the headline. The date of 50k years ago does not seem to appear anywhere in the linked academic paper, does not correspond to climate change at the start of the current interglacial, and does not correspond to evidence of the arrival of humans in North America. Even the body of the phys.org article doesn't say the extinction happened then.
askvictor 2y ago
I thought it was accepted that Australian megafauna went extinct due to humans. But could also be a combination of factors e.g weakened by a climatic shift then finished off by newly arrived human predators
MaxHoppersGhost 2y ago
My thoughts as well. If the native Americans had the technological ability to extinct the Buffalo they would have done it. Just as they killed off many more fragile species and other tribes. Life in pre Colombian America was just as nasty as it was in post Colombian America.
- earthboundkid 2y ago
  > If the native Americans had the technological ability to extinct the Buffalo I think it's more the case of if they didn't have the ability to create a balance. Things like the creation of the Amazon rainforest and the domestication of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, quinoa, llamas, etc. were because Native Americans figured out how to do those things. It's likely though that the first Native Americans just didn't know that stuff yet and accidentally ate all the mammoths or whatever because they didn't yet have a tradition of "only eat the mammoths when the third moon rises after Orion returns" or whatever. Those kinds of cultural traditions are social technologies, and they enable ways of life that would otherwise collapse in a few decades. In the Pacific, Hawaiians and others had seemingly useless taboos like "women can't eat bananas" but following the taboo rules sustained a huge population (estimates for Hawaii vary, but it was at least a significant fraction of the current population without international shipping!). In the Amazon, manioc is a great staple crop… as long as you serve it exactly right so you don't slowly poison yourself. They figured that out, but I'm sure there were many generations that got it wrong before they got it right. So I don't think the framing should be "plains Indians didn't know how to kill off the buffalo." Rather a) plains Indians didn't have horses pre-European contact, so that whole way of life didn't exist until modernity and b) balancing with nature is a learned cultural achievement.
  - colechristensen 2y ago
    No, it's not about any woo woo natural balance. Mammoths were really easy to kill and if they were anything like their elephant cousins would have taken 10-15 years to reach sexual maturity. Their population would also be considerably lower and larger animals are more sensitive to change because they reproduce slower and their are fewer of them. Buffalo on the other hand reach sexual maturity at 2-3 years, there were many more of them. They replaced their populations faster. The first humans in North America didn't extinct buffalo because they couldn't, they would have had to have much more population and civilization progress before that became a risk.
warcher 2y ago
I have yet to come to a satisfying explanation for the origin of that fetish. I suppose in the absence of any historical record you can make up whatever story you like, but the self flagellation that comes with it is so weird.
- tazu 2y ago
  Isn't is just the noble savage fallacy as usual?
  - warcher 2y ago
    Yeah but what’s with the masochism attached to it?
    - WithinReason 2y ago
      My theory it's due to the plethora of nature documentaries making humans into villains. It worked.

sudofail 2y ago

Or simply because we don't have evidance of Homo Sapiens in the Americas until ~20k years ago, 30k years after megafuana extinction.

colechristensen 2y ago
There were wooly mammoths alive in 2000 BC, 600 years after the Great Pyramid was built. There is evidence of humans and mammoths being in north America together. https://www.livescience.com/woolly-mammoths-in-north-america-longer https://www.livescience.com/woolly-mammoths-in-north-america...
mkl 2y ago
The extinction doesn't seem to have happened 50k years ago in North America. That seems to have been made up by whoever wrote the headline. The date of 50k years ago does not seem to appear anywhere in the linked academic paper, does not correspond to climate change at the start of the current interglacial, and does not correspond to evidence of the arrival of humans in North America. Even the body of the phys.org article doesn't say the extinction happened then.

askvictor 2y ago

I thought it was accepted that Australian megafauna went extinct due to humans. But could also be a combination of factors e.g weakened by a climatic shift then finished off by newly arrived human predators

MaxHoppersGhost 2y ago

My thoughts as well. If the native Americans had the technological ability to extinct the Buffalo they would have done it. Just as they killed off many more fragile species and other tribes. Life in pre Colombian America was just as nasty as it was in post Colombian America.

earthboundkid 2y ago
> If the native Americans had the technological ability to extinct the Buffalo I think it's more the case of if they didn't have the ability to create a balance. Things like the creation of the Amazon rainforest and the domestication of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, quinoa, llamas, etc. were because Native Americans figured out how to do those things. It's likely though that the first Native Americans just didn't know that stuff yet and accidentally ate all the mammoths or whatever because they didn't yet have a tradition of "only eat the mammoths when the third moon rises after Orion returns" or whatever. Those kinds of cultural traditions are social technologies, and they enable ways of life that would otherwise collapse in a few decades. In the Pacific, Hawaiians and others had seemingly useless taboos like "women can't eat bananas" but following the taboo rules sustained a huge population (estimates for Hawaii vary, but it was at least a significant fraction of the current population without international shipping!). In the Amazon, manioc is a great staple crop… as long as you serve it exactly right so you don't slowly poison yourself. They figured that out, but I'm sure there were many generations that got it wrong before they got it right. So I don't think the framing should be "plains Indians didn't know how to kill off the buffalo." Rather a) plains Indians didn't have horses pre-European contact, so that whole way of life didn't exist until modernity and b) balancing with nature is a learned cultural achievement.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  No, it's not about any woo woo natural balance. Mammoths were really easy to kill and if they were anything like their elephant cousins would have taken 10-15 years to reach sexual maturity. Their population would also be considerably lower and larger animals are more sensitive to change because they reproduce slower and their are fewer of them. Buffalo on the other hand reach sexual maturity at 2-3 years, there were many more of them. They replaced their populations faster. The first humans in North America didn't extinct buffalo because they couldn't, they would have had to have much more population and civilization progress before that became a risk.

warcher 2y ago

I have yet to come to a satisfying explanation for the origin of that fetish. I suppose in the absence of any historical record you can make up whatever story you like, but the self flagellation that comes with it is so weird.

tazu 2y ago
Isn't is just the noble savage fallacy as usual?
- warcher 2y ago
  Yeah but what’s with the masochism attached to it?
  - WithinReason 2y ago
    My theory it's due to the plethora of nature documentaries making humans into villains. It worked.