81–90 of 137 posts
"Fire-stick farming" (i.e. burning forests to make hunting easier) is said to have helped Aboriginal Australians sort out their megafauna.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Younger Dryas Impact Theory has always been somewhat controversial but it has basically become political due to being JRE listener coded now.
I prefer Robert Schoch's theory that it was a solar outburst (aka micro-nova) rather than a comet that dramatically warmed the entire Earth. (he was also on Joe Rogan)
"Fire-stick farming" (i.e. burning forests to make hunting easier) is said to have helped Aboriginal Australians sort out their megafauna.
Australian forests evolved to burn every few years. Any megafauna living in Australia would know how to survive a forest fire (as modern fauna in Australia does), because they'd experience them regularly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I note that the megafauna extinction was done by people of all races and creeds, long before capitalism existed.
This, I think, is part of the controversy. In Australia there's this "noble savage in tune with their environment" thing about the Indigenous people; that they are custodians of the land and live in harmony with nature. The idea that they are also responsible for the mass extinction of the megafauna is incompatible with this idea, and therefore unacceptable.
The noble savage trope died out years ago - haven't seen much of that in any serious circles since the back to nature french quasi-anthro types were grooving to La Vallée by Barbet Schroeder (with the Pink Floyd soundtrack).
> The idea that they are also responsible for the mass extinction of the megafauna is
.. pretty hard to land, save for the possibility of a small number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna
Head on down to "Causes of extinction" and read carefully, there are a lot of some's.
New evidence based on accurate optically stimulated luminescence and uranium-thorium dating of megafaunal remains suggests that humans were the ultimate cause of the extinction for some of the megafauna in Australia.
Humans in Australia appear to be responsible for, at most, the final death blow to a few of the species that were on their way out already.
If you have evidence to the contrary I'd gladly accept it.
https://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.
Sometimes I go down these Wikipedia rabbit holes, and one of the most fascinating to me is extinct animals that were not dinosaurs. Specifically, how a lot of mammal apex predators are similar to extinct versions, just like, half the size. Like the American Lion and Direwolf. Also how this was relatively recent, as others have pointed out they think that a lot of these species went extinct around 10,000 years ago. Th…
Sometimes I go down these Wikipedia rabbit holes, and one of the most fascinating to me is extinct animals that were not dinosaurs. Specifically, how a lot of mammal apex predators are similar to extinct versions, just like, half the size. Like the American Lion and Direwolf. Also how this was relatively recent, as others have pointed out they think that a lot of these species went extinct around 10,000 years ago. Th…
There have been recent evidence that seems to push that 10,000 year entry of humans into the Americas out by as much as another 10K further back.
https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-research-and-developme...
I'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 hig…
Seems 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 200…