Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
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Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#2Interesting, fits the current thing… well?
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#3More likely, early humans simply killed off the large herbivores, and the large predators simply starved.
This happened in Australia. All the local megafauna disappeared rapidly once humans settled in.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#4More likely, early humans simply killed off the large herbivores, and the large predators simply starved. This happened in Australia. All the local megafauna disappeared rapidly once humans settled in.
The fire hypothesis is compatible with what you said. The idea is that humans either directly or indirectly caused frequent and vast wildfires that destroyed ecosystems, and those fires either killed animals directly or destroyed the resources they needed to survive.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#5So kind of interesting, in trying to find a way to view the gist of the content behind the above paywall, I found this article from about 5 years ago:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/19/604031141...
> New Study Says Ancient Humans Hunted Big Mammals To Extinction
> Smith found that when humans arrived someplace, the rate of extinction for big mammals rose
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#6More likely, early humans simply killed off the large herbivores, and the large predators simply starved. This happened in Australia. All the local megafauna disappeared rapidly once humans settled in.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/wildfire-people-are-starting-a-...
It seems to be a pattern to this day. I view the flames as a kind of Asmovian terraforming.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#7So kind of interesting, in trying to find a way to view the gist of the content behind the above paywall, I found this article from about 5 years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/19/604031141... > New Study Says Ancient Humans Hunted Big Mammals To Extinction > Smith found that when humans arrived someplace, the rate of extinction for big mammals rose
The NYT article is a theory that considers human behaviors besides hunting:
>In a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, a group of paleontologists that analyzed fossil records at La Brea Tar Pits, a famous excavation site in Southern California, concluded that the disappearance of sabertooth cats, dire wolves and other large mammals in this region nearly 13,000 years ago was linked to rising temperatures and increased fire activity spurred by people.
This is the article the NYT is citing: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo3594
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#8https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Extincti...
Humans were the reason, on all continents.
https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline
"By around 10,000 years ago we see a huge decline of wild mammals. It’s hard to give a precise estimate of the size of these losses millennia ago, but they were large: likely in the range of 25% to 50%."
"It wasn’t just that we lost a lot of mammals. It was almost exclusively the world’s largest mammals that vanished. This big decline of mammals is referred to as the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction (QME). The QME led to the extinction of more than 178 of the world’s large mammals (‘megafauna’)."
We lost the biggest animals because those were the ones we hunted. If the reason were to be the fire (which sounds ridiculous), it would have caused the extinction of mammals of all sizes, not just the largest ones.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#9I'd be highly skeptical of this claim.
Large megafauna around the entire world began dying off both before and after the last glacial maximum, even in areas where there wasn't a significant human presence. The fact that they died off in North America around that time, too, isn't that surprising.
It's also worth noting that at that time, a large part of North America was covered in savanna, which is among the most highly fire-prone habitats, regardless of humans.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#10Seems that Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis might fit these observations too.
"We obtained radiocarbon dates on 172 specimens from seven extinct and one extant species... spanning 15.6 to 10.0 thousand calendar years before present (ka)."
YDIH event is estimated at 12900 BP and includes vast wildfires in its scenario, including in North America.
Contrast that with the idea that humans have been in Sapiens form for 200kya+, using fire for longer even than we have been Sapiens and have probably been in the Americas far before 13kya. Is the idea that despite the capability, we only at this specific time started the extinction program? At just the moment when there's sign of a globally catastrophic impact?
YDIH seems more parsimonious, yet the paper doesn't mention it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Younger_Dryas_impact_hypo...