When human beings (homo sapiens) reached Australia all the huge marsupials there quickly (in relative terms) died off. When human beings reached the Americas, all the huge animals (giant sloth, saber toothed lion) died off. Did we exterminate them-our closest competitors?
Until 30,000 years ago we shared the planet with other human species-did we exterminate them too?
Can't say about 30,000 years ago, but human impact is evident in the last one or two thousand years. Whether it be dodo, or passenger pigeon, human beings have made them extinct with their ideology of 'the master of the nature'. The nature culture dualism has made many extinctions in the last couple of hundred years.
Yes. That master of nature business seems to be the essential problem.
As with most good questions, the answer is: it depends. It depends on which megafauna you are talking about, when, and where. In the case of the Americas, the weight of evidence suggests that humans did wipe out a large portion of megafauna approximately 13,000-10,000 years before present, and much of the evidence in support of this conclusion is covered in this lovely book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Twilight-Mammoths-Extinctions-Rewilding-Environments/dp/0520252438.
The evidence is probably even greater in Australia where early homo sapiens cleared the land with the use of fire exterminating the prey or foodstuffs of the megafauna.
Hello Stanley -- There is a considerable record in the literature of researchers going back and forth on the question of whether human hunting was the prime agent in late Pleistocene/early Holocene megafaunal extinctions (e.g., going back decades to Paul Martin's "Blitskrieg (or, "Overkill") Hypothesis"), or whether the global climatic change associated with the end of the last Ice Age drove deterministic extinctions of megafaunal species (i.e., they were unable to adapt to the climatic changes and the changes in resource availability that would have resulted). Bit of a false dichotomy, I think -- both factors likely contributed to the global wave of megafaunal extinctions in the late Pleistocene/early Holocene. That's the position Barnosky and colleagues took in a 2004 paper that made a global assessment of megafaunal extinctions -- in some places (e.g., Australia, as well as North America, not to mention Madagascar and New Zealand), humans were identified as the likely prime agent (in N. America, climatic factors were given a minor secondary role); in Europe combined effects of human hunting pressure and climatic change were identified as the likely causal factors in megafaunal die-offs, while in Africa and South America, they concluded that the picture was not clear (at that time): Barnosky et al., 2004. Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents. Science 1 Oct 2004: Vol. 306, Issue 5693, pp. 70-75 DOI: 10.1126/science.1101476 ; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5693/70.full . More recently, however, Sandom and colleagues came down squarely on the side of humans being the prime drivers in the late Pleistocene/early Holocene global megafaunal extinctions: Sandom C. et al. (2014). Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change. Proc. R. Soc. B 281: 20133254. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.3254 ; Article Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to human...
As humans either directly or indirectly are known to be responsible for huge numbers of near or actual extinctions, it is strange so many attempts have been made to deny the obvious. As changes in climate cannot be held to be responsible prior to humankind's world-wide emergence, after all an asteroid did for the dinosaurs, we are the obvious key for the disappearance of the giant sloth and many huge carnivours.
I have been particularly interested in the survival of African large fauna, as that is where the human race began-with respect more so as lions etc disappeared elsewhere (Europe/Near East/Asia.)
Hello again, Stanley,
I think your characterization that, "...changes in climate cannot be held to be responsible prior to humankind's world-wide emergence..." might be a bit of an overstatement. A number of paleoanthropologists put stock in Plio-Pleistocene climatic fluctuations having played a major role in hominin evolution -- for example, see:
Article A synthesis of the theories and concepts of early human evolution
Yes, Ian. I'm aware of that but that after all is not extinction.
Nevertheless, my point referred to the climate changes we know off-that is if Neanderthal was able to survive extreme conditions why should any known changes have affected them. As with the large animals in Australia and the Americas. I have no doubt climate change can cause extinction, but I'm not sure it can do it quite so efficiently and again in the past it has been events that have caused the damage.
Human actions (whether in the past or at present) has always been exerting excessive pressure on megafauna which is driving their population to extinction. Population of species (especially the megafaunas) with low fertility rate are mostly stressed and just enough hunting pressure will keep them below replacement levels. Eventually, the population will collapse.
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