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Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

nytimes.com

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Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

#21

Post by candiddevmike »

gumby wrote: post #15
cyberax wrote: post #3

More 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.

And we still haven't outgrown that behavior. We as a species keep burning the proverbial forests to get an easy win.

Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

#23

Post by jlawson »

myshpa wrote: post #8

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…

[flagged]

Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

#24

Post by myshpa »

candiddevmike wrote: post #20
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline

"What’s most shocking is how few humans were responsible for this large-scale destruction of wildlife. There were likely fewer than 5 million people in the world. Around half the population of London today."

Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

#25

Post by paganel »

gamblor956 wrote: post #22
paganel wrote: post #11

[flagged]

Both things can be true: that ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, and that sea level rise cause a specific local species to go extinct when its habitat was fully flooded.

So why doesn't the Western media still push the discourse of sea-level rise and "NYC is going to get drowned any minute now!"?

Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

#26

Post by AndrewKemendo »

candiddevmike wrote: post #20
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well the estimates are kind of all over the place but basically growing from ~1M - 15M over the course of 40000 years, before the Neolithic explosion

Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

#27

Post by ceejayoz »

jlawson wrote: post #23
myshpa wrote: post #8

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…

[flagged]

> Expect to see more grasping at straws to try to blame climate change or whatever.

It's grasping at straws to propose that the end of an ice age might involve some climate change?

Human predation certainly played a role, but pretending the ice caps melting can't have is... something.

Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

#28

Post by pmayrgundter »

pmayrgundter wrote: post #10

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…

A little more reading..

"All extinct mammals dated in this study have last occurrence dates older than 13.00 ka, with a modeled extirpation time estimate across all taxa of 13.07 to 12.89 ka [using the Gaussian-Resampled Inverse-Weighted McInerney (GRIMW) extinction estimator"

Even tighter bound than my comment and still a tight fit around 12900. Figure 1 in their paper shows this as well.

In other news, there was recently a "comprehensive refutation" of YDIH (pre-print) that a fave of my, Martin Sweatman, takes a good look at.

A lot of this debate comes down to careful dating, error bars, etc.

https://martinsweatman.blogspot.com/2023/08/debunking-hollid...

Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

#29

Post by codexb »

myshpa wrote: post #16
codexb wrote: post #13

Earlier 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.

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…

And yet, for some reason, ancient humans decided not to eat all the elephants.

No, it was climate change.

The last, small population of mammoths that survived until 4000 years ago on Wrangel Island never came in contact with humans. They died because they were ill suited for the climate they lived in.

Re: Ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

#30

Post by ceejayoz »

paganel wrote: post #25
gamblor956 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both things can be true: that ancient fires drove large mammals extinct, and that sea level rise cause a specific local species to go extinct when its habitat was fully flooded.

So why doesn't the Western media still push the discourse of sea-level rise and "NYC is going to get drowned any minute now!"?

Maybe you're just not reading any of it?

Ten days old: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interacti...

NYC, specifically: https://abcnews.go.com/Awards/rising-sea-levels-affect-new-y...

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