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Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
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Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#12https://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 e…
> Humans were the reason, on all continents.
The article doesn't disagree, saying both "increased fire activity spurred by people" and "Dr. Dunn emphasized that this pattern could not account for the notable disappearance of large mammals elsewhere in the world at the end of the last ice age".
> 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.
No, not necessarily. A small animal can retreat into a burrow an elephant-sized one cannot. They also breed faster afterwards, allowing their populations to recover more readily.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#13https://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 e…
The mass extinction of large megafauna, all around the world, at roughly the same time, isn't explained by humans (see woolly mammoths). There's far more evidence that it was driven by climate change as the world quickly exited the last glacial maximum.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#14Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#15More 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.
How do you think some of those humans hunted in Australia? They would travel to a burnt forest (or set fire to one) and then walk around eating the cooked animals until they'd rotted or been eaten, and then move on.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#16https://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 e…
The mass extinction of large megafauna, all around the world, at roughly the same time, isn't explained by humans (see woolly mammoths). There's far more evidence that it was driven by climate change as the world quickly exited the last glacial maximum.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/08/us/woolly-mammoths-death-...
Last mammoths died 4000 years ago, and they might have even lived longer, if short-term events hadn’t tainted their water and drained their food supply.
It wasn't climate change that killed off the mammoths; it was humans.
https://www.google.com/search?q=mammoth+house&tbm=isch
We ate them all. It was only when there were no big animals left to hunt that we invented agriculture.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#17https://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 e…
The mass extinction of large megafauna, all around the world, at roughly the same time, isn't explained by humans (see woolly mammoths). There's far more evidence that it was driven by climate change as the world quickly exited the last glacial maximum.
Climate change potentially caused by catastrophic comet impacts.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#18https://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 e…
The mass extinction of large megafauna, all around the world, at roughly the same time, isn't explained by humans (see woolly mammoths). There's far more evidence that it was driven by climate change as the world quickly exited the last glacial maximum.
It’s both.
Human populations were growing rapidly and simultaneously the period from 50000-10000 was the end of the last ice age
So the going theory is that the original areas of climate for which mega fauna were most populous, was effectively reduced increasingly over time as a result of warming, which humans were able to capitalize on to the point where we kind of “finished the job.”
This is effectively, how we see extinction patterns around the globe. Whereas humans aren’t necessarily the primary or only cause, but they do make a big enough exogenous impact to cause a collapse.
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#19This is great new information helping to further the debate about causes of the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction (QME).
I’ll reiterate here my theory that the specific period following this extinction event, was catastrophic for human civilization and drove humanity to invent property and thus the system of capital and exchange.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event
Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mass extinction of large megafauna, all around the world, at roughly the same time, isn't explained by humans (see woolly mammoths). There's far more evidence that it was driven by climate change as the world quickly exited the last glacial maximum.
It’s both. Human populations were growing rapidly and simultaneously the period from 50000-10000 was the end of the last ice age So the going theory is that the original areas of climate for which mega fauna were most populous, was effectively reduced increasingly over time as a result of warming, which humans were able to capitalize on to the point where we kind of “finished the job.” This is effectively, how we see…
How big of a population are we talking here