Comment by fractallyte
4 days ago
“So, the first inhabitants in this land would have been encountering the giant beaver.”
...and killing them.
It's curious how megafauna extinctions coincide with human arrival... Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other "First Peoples" were just as deadly as later European settlers.
The Once and Future World by J.B. MacKinnon eloquently describes our disastrous impact on Nature: https://www.jbmackinnon.ca/the-once-and-future-world
> It's curious how megafauna extinctions coincide with human arrival... Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other "First Peoples" were just as deadly as later European settlers.
That's one possible, maybe even likely scenario.
But humans started moving around at that time for a non-human reason; the end of the Ice Age. There's some evidence for populations of large mammals dying out before humans are believed to have showed up in those places, like Australia.
(As with most changes of this magnitude, the true answer is probably "more than one thing".)
Also, we tend to think of human effects and the change in climate to be mutually exclusive, but even if the end of the ice age had zero effect on the ability of megafauna to eat or reproduce, and an increase predation from the introduction of humans was the sole cause of their extinction, the presence of those humans itself would be an effect of the ice age ending.
These animals survived multiple climate changes before that. Nope, it was humans.
We're the reason the North American continent has _no_ large predators except bears.
Again, it’s probably both.
We humans nearly bought it during the same period; we bottlenecked at ~1,000 individuals for millennia. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
The other hominins didn’t make it.
By your argument, if a species survives multiple climate changes it can never go extinct /except/ by human intervention.
Not true.
1 reply →
> It's curious how megafauna extinctions coincide with human arrival... Native Americans, Australian Aborigines
Native americans and australian aborigines arrival coincided with drastic climate change. Or put another way, climate change was a major driver of human migration.
> were just as deadly as later European settlers.
Unless natives and aborigines had guns, railroads, mass farming, etc, I highly doubt it. Not to mention the population boom due to modern medicine and mass migration.
If you consider the relatively small native american and aborigine populations, the technology involved and how gigantic america and australia is, it's absurd to think natives or aborigines wiped out the megafauna.
Species extinction has two major causes - climate/environment change and loss of habitat. Were the natives and aborigines sophisticated enough to cause climate/environment change or develop farming to a degree that deprived the megafauna of their habitats? I highly doubt it.
> it's absurd to think natives or aborigines wiped out the megafauna.
Aside from the plausible scenario of driving whole herds off cliffs (because it was safer than trying to separate one or two from the herd).