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This article is poorly written, bringing up Paraceratherium is disingenuous considering they went extinct 23 mya. It took 400 years after Columbus for the Ameri

This article is poorly written, bringing up Paraceratherium is disingenuous considering they went extinct 23 mya. It took 400 years after Columbus for the American Bison population to drop to near extinction, not 70 years. Do people upvote articles without reading them?

wil421 12y ago
I think some facts got mixed up. Perhaps they were talking about 70 years after America was founded? Still doesn't seem accurate. Most of the interior US, especially the west, wasn't accessible until the rail roads came. It was my understanding most of the mass buffalo hunting was because of the railroads.
- tofof 12y ago
  Agreed; the '500 remain' number seems to be most applicable to the beginning of the 20th century, which isn't really '70 years' from any historical milestone. (Google "500 buffalo remained", with quotes).
pflanze 12y ago
> It took 400 years This is not a meaningful number either if the drop (or, more to the point, the overhunting) only really started 70 years before the end of the period. I haven't found any clear statement about this, but the following article talks about the "19th century hunts". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting
- mturmon 12y ago
  Yes, I assume the bison of the Great Plains were somewhat nonplussed when Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Caribbean. The point being that Columbus is not the relevant marker, even though the article brought him up. In this sense the GP comment has a point, that's bad writing. It is interesting that the bison continued to thrive (until the 1800s), and I guess I never thought about why they outlasted the Ice Age/predation thing that killed off the other large animals.
  - droithomme 12y ago
    I'm curious. How do you figure the natives killed off all the tens of millions of megafauna given that extinction occurred when they had just arrived over the bering strait, numbering a few thousand across north and south america?
    - mturmon 12y ago
      I read the summary reports by experts, and that's their explanation (incidentally, I'm not sure about counts, but "tens of millions" sounds high for most megafauna species -- their small numbers is part of their survival problem). If I remember right, the last time I read this story was at the elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo, or perhaps the standing exhibit at the La Brea Tar Pits. I'm just an interested outsider, so that's good enough for me. IIRC, the whole Bering Straits story is itself more complex than I learned in grade school. It was open longer, and was wider and bigger than originally thought. I believe humans came across in several waves that are genetically or archeologically separable. I read a lot of stuff in Science, and remember about 20%, and 50% of those memories are part-wrong, so take this with a grain of salt. ;-)
    - speeder 12y ago
      Brazil has a bunch of archeological sites much older than the last land bridge on the strait, of course several historians go histerical with the mention that prehistoric humans might have crossed the pacific by boat, so to them only the strait idea is valid and south american paleontologists are liars... Or they just say that humans arrived here by unknown means, anyway we have 40.000 year old settlement sites, 40.000 years is time enough to extinguish whatever you want even if your population is in the hundreds...

wil421 12y ago

I think some facts got mixed up. Perhaps they were talking about 70 years after America was founded? Still doesn't seem accurate. Most of the interior US, especially the west, wasn't accessible until the rail roads came. It was my understanding most of the mass buffalo hunting was because of the railroads.

tofof 12y ago
Agreed; the '500 remain' number seems to be most applicable to the beginning of the 20th century, which isn't really '70 years' from any historical milestone. (Google "500 buffalo remained", with quotes).

pflanze 12y ago

> It took 400 years This is not a meaningful number either if the drop (or, more to the point, the overhunting) only really started 70 years before the end of the period. I haven't found any clear statement about this, but the following article talks about the "19th century hunts". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting

mturmon 12y ago
Yes, I assume the bison of the Great Plains were somewhat nonplussed when Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Caribbean. The point being that Columbus is not the relevant marker, even though the article brought him up. In this sense the GP comment has a point, that's bad writing. It is interesting that the bison continued to thrive (until the 1800s), and I guess I never thought about why they outlasted the Ice Age/predation thing that killed off the other large animals.
- droithomme 12y ago
  I'm curious. How do you figure the natives killed off all the tens of millions of megafauna given that extinction occurred when they had just arrived over the bering strait, numbering a few thousand across north and south america?
  - mturmon 12y ago
    I read the summary reports by experts, and that's their explanation (incidentally, I'm not sure about counts, but "tens of millions" sounds high for most megafauna species -- their small numbers is part of their survival problem). If I remember right, the last time I read this story was at the elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo, or perhaps the standing exhibit at the La Brea Tar Pits. I'm just an interested outsider, so that's good enough for me. IIRC, the whole Bering Straits story is itself more complex than I learned in grade school. It was open longer, and was wider and bigger than originally thought. I believe humans came across in several waves that are genetically or archeologically separable. I read a lot of stuff in Science, and remember about 20%, and 50% of those memories are part-wrong, so take this with a grain of salt. ;-)
  - speeder 12y ago
    Brazil has a bunch of archeological sites much older than the last land bridge on the strait, of course several historians go histerical with the mention that prehistoric humans might have crossed the pacific by boat, so to them only the strait idea is valid and south american paleontologists are liars... Or they just say that humans arrived here by unknown means, anyway we have 40.000 year old settlement sites, 40.000 years is time enough to extinguish whatever you want even if your population is in the hundreds...