Re: Death of Megafauna



"Uwe Müller" wrote:
>
> "prd" <X_header@xxxxxxxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag

[..]

> > I would answer that during the later period culture changed, the
> > weapons improved, and the decline in megafauna falls the appearance
> > of these new technology cultures.
>
> Migratory animals need a vast territory to themselves, if non-migratory
> animals start to feed all year round on what is supposed to be the winter
> feeding grounds of lets say mammoth, what can mammoth do but starve?
> With the warming of temperatures all kinds of small insects and
> microorganism might multiply, driving animals away, that were not used to
> them.
> Rising temperature may have blocked migratory passages, by making rivers and
> bogs ice free, or not frozen deep enough, to carry the weight any more. The
> rising humidity may wel have played an in important part.
> Humans like other predators were dangerous to very young and very old
> animals, to sick and wounded ones. They took mammoth that got trapped in a
> bog, but I know of no hunting pits with remains of trapped mammoth in them,
> no large killing sites with dozens of dead mammoth, ....
>
> Could a couple of hundred or even thousand palaeolithic hunters hunt mammoth
> to extinction in a time were mammoth bones a scarce in human settlements?
> Maybe, even though not very likely. But who would have hunted for the rest
> of the humans, those that could not roam the steppes just for the killing?
> We know, that when whole tribes specialised in hunting mammoth, they did not
> exterminate them.

There are certain ideology that likes to blame every natural
phenomenon on "native people" - it includes causing the extinction of
the megafauna.

The most plausible reason I have seen for the extinction of the
megafauna is simple (as most plausible reasons are) - the warming of
the climate was the cause. This caused several things to occur - it
altered their food supplies, changed climates to drier environment -
dried up lakes and water courses in Australia in particular. More
importantly the megafauna's cooling mechanism is theorised to have
been insufficiently well developed to cool the animals sufficiently
and they suffered from "heat stroke".

There is VERY little evidence of Aborigines having caused the
extinction to occur (only one spear point found embedded in the
teeth/jaw bone of a giant wombat). The same in North America. This
claim is made despite the cohabitation of the Aborigines with the
megafauna for some 20,000 years. Similarly in North America, the
people lived in harmony for millennia with the megafauna. It is far
too 'convenient' (for some ideologies) to have it caused by "natives".


[..]
--
SIR - Philosopher unauthorised
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The one who is educated from the wrong books is not educated, he is
misled.
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Relevant Pages

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