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Early Man: The Cause of Mass Extinction?
xpccx writes: "There's an article over at CNN about the possibility that early man hunted large animals ( like mammoths ) into extinction. "New work by American and Australian researchers is adding weight to the theory, while undercutting the notion that climate change and not human influence was the cause."" Update: 06/14 03:32 PM by H : This is touched on in Guns, Germs and Steel, which I highly recommend. This has been the going theory with many (most?) historians as to why the megafauna in Australia, the Americas all disappeared within a couple thousand years of the appearance of humans. Considering they had survived countless millenia before our arrival, I'm inclined to think that the two events might just kinda be linked.
I, for one, am glad that I don't have to worry about one of those showing up in my back yard.
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It's not like ancient man had the tools nessecery to kill off a sufficient quantity of any animal as to drive it to extinction
They sure as heck did, especially in cases of the huge, lumbering wooly-mammoth type animals. In the beginning, such animals were hunted at close-quarters by spear-holding humans. Kills were hard-earned with frequent human casualties until an innovation called the atlatl enabled much smaller bands of hunters to kill much more easily and with far fewer casualties. Various difficulties involving population growth and over-hunting insued, with lasting ramifications for our old wooly pals!
**>>BELCH
Since when did we stop being part of natural selection?
Read Daniel Quinne's Ishmael. He discusses this issue in depth with far more eloquence than I.
Humans aren't just hunting animals, they are waging all out war against (some) animals. Why? Because they compete against us for food. Farmers exterminate wolves and foxes that prey upon their livestock, rabbits that prey upon their produce, etc. etc. We gas insects routinely for the same reason. In this all out war, many species are diven to the brink of extinction and beyond. Others survive, marginalized and with an ever more depleated reserve of genetic diversity, lessoning their capacity for adaptation when natural ecological changes occur. Add to that the very unnatural, man-made ecological changes occurring (global warming, which a mountain of scientific evidence supports despite the nay-saying of a few ostrich-mimicking humans) and you do have mass extinction caused by humankind.
But, and here's the real catch people like you seem to miss, it isn't just about the extinction of other species. It is about our own impending extinction. Contrary to popular myth, propogated by everything from right-wing religious fanatics to left-wing "we can manage the ecosphere" to trekkie/trekker "social and technological change will solve these problems" optomists that we are somehow "above" or "outside" of our ecology, we are an inherent part of the ecological structure and web of food chains we ourselves are ravaging.
If we continue as we are, we will in the not so very distant future bring the entire structure crashing down, along with it that portion of the ecology which supports our own food chain. For example, if the worms die, our soil dies, and with it our crops, and ultimately ourselves. Why should worms die? The reason may not be obvious, but they, as we, are a part of an entire complex web of interdependency, key portions of which are being thoughtlesshack hacked out of existence with unforseen consiquences. Warnings abound: dustbowls, the desertification of once lush areas through absolutist agricultural methods which, in those regions, left the ecosystem in such tatters that, thousands of years later, it still hasn't recovered. Entire civilizations (e.g. the Mayans) are believed to have vanished in no small part as a result of agricultural collaps.
Take a look at it from another perspective. At one time there were a thousand different types of apples, some sweet, some tart, some red, some yellow, some green. Now there are a handfull of types which are mass-farmed. The same holds true for virtually every other food product we consume: where once there was tremendous diversity there are now a scant few surviving types, and many of those (oranges, for example) have been deliberately bred to not be able to reproduce (no seeds). What was once a robust food chain, with enough redundancy to withstand tremendoous changes in the environment (whether such changes be the emergence of a new species of plant, animal or insect, or climatic change) there remains only a fragile few choices, any one of which can be wiped out by a single parisite or disease.
It isn't as obvious as the Irish potato famine, which resulted in no small part because there was only one food crop of significance, and when it failed, everyone starved, but the principle is the same. The more we weaken our supporting ecology, whether it is by reducing the diversity of our own food sources, or that of the life around us (even competing life, such as wolves and the like), the more vulnerable we become to any change, no matter how small.
Down this road lies inevitable extinction, it is really only a question of how soon and how fast.
The solution doesn't require us foregoing technology, as some of the luddite inspired environmentalists would have us believe. It doesn't even necessarilly mean foregoing genetic enhancement of food products (although Monsato's habit of making seeds steril to protect their so-called intellectual property is certainly one way to jump-start a famine). It is only necessary that we stop waging war on the life around us and stop trying to turn every square meter of land into a production device for human food.
Back off, allow some robustness to return to our supporting ecology, and we will not only have less extinctions, we may even manage to prevent our own.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Take a visit to Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. They have quite an exhibit of recently (within the last few tens of millenia) critters. North America of a few tens of thousands of years ago was packed with exotic megafauna that would make the Serengeti look like the North America of today in comparison. The reason Africa has so many animals is that they evolved with people, and instinctively know to avoid them.
A friend of mine showed me an interesting trick. If a dog is harassing you, reach down and touch the ground with the knuckles of your first two fingers. The dog either backs off, or it goes completely ballistic, because that posture, that of a human being reaching down to pick up a rock, is hardwired into its genes to mean trouble.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
and if you can name a greater despoiler of the environment than the Godless commies, name one, cf. the Caspian Sea has shrunk in half due to Communist environmental degradation and water diversion
I believe you mean the Aral sea, which has shrunk in size due to the diversion of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya river for cotton agriculture.
While authoritarianism in its various forms is particular prone to environmental abuse, the Aral disaster is more due to the unique nature of the place than a divine punishment of an evil economic system. The Aral is a landlocked lake in an arid region, and is fed by two major rivers that are the only source of water in the region.
I've exactly seen the same practices in captialist countries, it's just that the impact is different because the geography is different. For example, I've personally leaped over the Rio Copiopo of northern Chile where it meets the sea -- it starts as a good sized river in the mountains and it ends up about two meters wide and 3 cm deep. If there were a landlocked lake that was fed by this river, it would be gone. The difference is that it empties into the Pacific.
What about the mighty Colorado? What if that emptied into a lake instead of the Pacific? It's hard to believe that if the Aral were in the US or any other capitalist country, it would be much better.
Capitalist countries have their own litany of environmental disasters: soil salinification in Australia, mass forest die offs in Europe, eutrophication or sterilization of lakes in North America, and so on. This is not a value judgement about Capitalism, just an simple observation. Planned economies stick people in a cycle of environmental misery from which they cannot escape, because of the general low level of development and adaptability in the economy ties them to the land. Capital nimbly redeploys itself so that as an investor I am blissfully insulated from the "bads" that my investments creates.
So capitalism is better for people, in the short run, in that it provides them with ways to route around environmental damage.
It doesn't mean we have to live this way. We don't have to catch the last two cod in the sea. We don't have to leave toxic waste ponds behind our gold mining operations. We are not unthinking animals. However, there are two kinds of positions to take in this debate. The first kind is taken by those who see an intrinsic value in nature and want to preserve it to some degree by regulating the actions of the market. These shade from moderates like myself to environmental extremists who would consider me no better than the worst of the lot. On the other hand there are those who believe there is no value other than what can be assigned by current market prices, and thus for whom any kind of regulation or limitation on environmental impacts is simply an irrational, unwarranted interference in the workings of a system which by definition is perfect.
There are axiomatic differences between these camps, and thus in the final analysis not much basis for rational discourse between them. So, we must fight.
You'd think that at a web site devoted to computers, nerds and logic, we would be immune to fellatious [sic] arguments based on emotion instead of logic, but you'd be wrong.
People who don't recognize the force of emotion in their arguments are doomed to be its unwitting slaves. I've never seen anybody who claims to be ultra-logical who actually puts down his axioms and produces theorems from them in a formal and correct way. Instead, they use the term 'logic' as a content-less emotional blugeon to dismiss people who weight evidence differently from them or disagree with their values. These are the people who are so blinded by their emotions they mistake their subjective preferences for objective reality.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One interesting side point on the subject of New World Mass Extinctions is its implications for how we think about Native American cultures as seen by the Europeans after Columbus. Typical European portrayals depict the Native Americans as existing in a pristine aboriginal state of Nature. What we can see now is that North America at the time of the first European colonists had actually undergone enormous environmental upheaval in the previous several thousand years. What the Europeans saw was not an original state but a hard won equilibrium. The striking harmony with nature seen in many Native American tribes was itself the product of a long process of natural selection.
As an aside, as a biologist and a grownup, I find it dispiriting to see the fraction of posts on biological topics that degenerate into sophomoric political ranting (invariably from non-biologists with a very shallow grasp of the topic). Even the simplest biological phenomenon -let alone something as complex as a whole ecology- is so much deeper and more complex that our simple political theories that it is just foolish to try to score polictical points by making the biology fit one's ideological preconceptions. Please, for the sake of the readers, keep the political ranting somewhere else and spend some time actually learning the biology.
You can make your point without insulting people's beliefs.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Anthropology in the News has links to a lot more news stories on these findings. The BBC story is very short, but noteworthy for including a little bit of information on the dating methods used in the Australian case.
Anthropology in the News updates a lot and doesn't keep stuff on its front page for very long, so for the sake of Slashdot's archives, I'm copying the links here.
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The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
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the humans brought 2 mammals with them - rats and dogs - and also started to hunt the indiginous Moas (think ostrich/emu but twice as big) within about 800 years all the moa species were extinct - and in the process large parts of the ground cover had been burnt and, in places, the topsoil blown away (there are whole mountains covered in nothing but shingle still today) - the result was wide spread, lasting ecological damage - as a side effect of hunting these species to extintion.
We have this myth of indigenous cultures as having this close affinity with the land ... and in fact the polynesian people who came to NZ had a well developed system for managing and protecting their fisheries that must have developed over the centuries surviving on small islands totally dependant on the sea. But when they came to NZ none of that applied to the land and the promptly did what europeans have done moving to new places (think buffalo, whales, etc) - slaughtered everything in sight assuming it was infinite and supply would last for ever - rather taking more of a controlled (farming like) approach to resource management. I suspect that sanity in resource management is sadly something you learn by screwing up badly - and as the Moa shows sometimes by the time you realise that it's a problem it's too late
To me, even more interesting is whether or not man killed off Neandertals. These guys were all over Europe for a very long time, and they were smart enought to fight back. A war with them would have truly been "World War One".
It's possible, but it's only a possibility among others. The only thing we know about interactions between Cro Magnon (the modern man) and Neanderthal is that they actually existed. Other than that, the evidence is scarce, and it's difficult to figure out. As of now, we think that Neanderthal were simply displaced by Cro-Magnon (modern man) immigrants who pushed them further and further, until they got "cornered" in southern Spain and Gibraltar, then eventually disappeared altogether. Interbreeding was long thought impossible, but recent evidence indicates that it was. Maybe we (white men of European descent) all have Neanderthal genes. Maybe not. We don't know.
The first genocide in history probably happened quite some time later, between two kind of people belonging to modern mankind: mongoloids and blacks: it was the destruction of Australian-like Aborigines (i.e. Blacks) by Northeast-Asians (i.e. the ancestors of what you call "Native Americans"). We have some archeological evidence, and more surprisingly, we even have documents !
However, even in this case, it is very possible that actual fighting only took a minor role, and that the first inhabitants were simply driven out of their lands further and further, up to Terra del Fuego (the island that forms the other side of the Magellan Strait).
When the number of years exceeds four figures, the only thing we know is that we hardly know anything.
Thomas Miconi
Actually mammoths didn't die off as long ago as everbody thought. There was an isolated group on an island that survived until only 5000 years ago. The thinking is that being on a remote island protected them from hunting by man which is why they survived so long. Details here, including the quote: "...surprisingly recent dates on woolly mammoth remains from Wrangel Island in 1990, ranging between 7390-4740 BP. The finds were remarkable for two reasons: they indicated mammoth survival on Wrangel Island for as much as 5000 years after the last known date of mammoths on the Eurasian continent, and they documented the evolution of a distinct dwarf mammoth population on Wrangel Island." Other theories include a virus induced extinction , but I think it was man... To me, even more interesting is whether or not man killed off Neandertals. These guys were all over Europe for a very long time, and they were smart enought to fight back. A war with them would have truly been "World War One". There is so far only one possible example of a possible human-Neandertal hybrid , so their disappearance probably wasn't from interbreeding...Let's take a poll, did humans deliberately destroy neandertals or were they the original Homer Simpsons that just died out???
Accepting evolution and the big bang as truth doesn't require rejecting religion. It doesn't even require rejecting fundamentalist Christian religion.
I've never really understood all the hoopla about this subject. There was a time, roughly the 1950s, when most of the U.S. professed to Christianity and nearly all of the U.S. was enraptured by science. If there's such a big conflict between science and creationism and evolution, wouldn't you think it would have been a big topic of debate back then? Yeah, the discussion flared up occasionally then and before (Scopes, anyone?), but most people just seemed to go along with one foot in each camp.
Or did they?
When I was a wee child, I was taught that science had most of the answers precisely because it was helping us understand the wonderful universe God had made. I was taught that God created everything in 7 days. And I was also reminded that the concept of time is pretty elastic. God probably doesn't view it like we do. Remember your Bible: "A day is like unto a thousand years."
So when I first asked about the conflict between "7 days" and "creation and evolution takes a bazillion years," I got a simple answer. To wit: "Everything in the Bible is literally true except where it's obviously intended as a parable or metaphor. In this case, of course God created the world in 7 days - 7 of His days. From our point of view, 7 of His days looks like a mighty long time. Don't get hung up on literalism and legalism. They are mere intellectual cudgels used in meaningless verbal battles between self-important idiots furiously engaged in competitive but highly transient mental masturbation." That always seemed reasonable to me.
God created everything in 7 days. The big bang and evolution are probably some of the tools he used to accomplish that task. Between those two statements, there is no conflict.
Is that so hard to accept?
This evidence of mass extinctions caused by early humans is going to rattle some people that I'd very much like to see smacked down.
In particular, there is this line of thought in environmental history that primitive humans were the "first ecologists". Many people seem really wedded to this idea to an extent that runs far, far beyond the facts. For example, the book Conquest of Paradise by Kirkpatrick Sale argues that not only were native americans environmentally enlightened, but-- by god!-- they were pretty much late 1990's liberals.
Since we know so extremely little about, say, native americans before 1000 AD, they too often serve as a sort of inkblot test. You can project your own fantasies about how people "should be" upon their culture. Not surprising, then, that a slipshod researcher like Sale "discovers" that humans in their natural state were card-carrying democrats.
Awkward facts, such as the native practice of stampeding buffalo heards off cliffs or burning entire forests to flush game get talked around in a fashion that would do ICANN proud.
The problem is that these notions do a great disservice to aboriginal people. First we colonize their land, and then we colonize their history: we run roughshod over the delicate, real evidence of their cultural history, and instead impose a fantasy history that serves our current political agenda. It's disgusting, and I'm glad to see another nail in coffin for such thinking.
called Ishmael. This book has so many interesting concepts and ideas... I won't even attempt to summarize in a blurb. But Ishmael talks at length about how man puts himself in a position where he(she) is at odds with the world.
I highly recommend reading this book, as it will open your eyes to some new ideas and most of all, make you think.
Take a look at amazon
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
But your argument is flawed
He says this without irony????
First off I would like to mention that even if we do kill off an entire species, it means that natural selection isn't working for that species...
Natural selection must be flawed because fish don't evolve fast enough to keep up with technological developments in GPS, fishing nets, diesel engines, and all of the other tools we use to catch fish? When you get laid off from your job because you are a moron will you complain that natural selection failed you too?
Secondly, The commercial fishing and hunting industries do not want to kill off an entire species or even come close to it...
Yes but individuals need to maximize thier personal efficency to make the greatest amount of money. It doesn't matter if The Institute of Fishermen Association of America doesn't want salmon to go extinct if every one of its members still goes out every day to catch as many as they can get away with.
You obviously have never lived in an area where the economy depended heavily on a natural resource that replenished itself slower than the companies were able to extract it.
In my case, I grew up in a timber town. All the high school kids expected to follow thier dads into the local mills. But, we cut the trees faster than the trees would grow. Some companies survived cutting second or third growth. But the scale had to be incredibly restricted. Most of the kids are doing things other than working in the lumber mills.
The same logic applied to fishing and hunting. If you use a natural resource faster than it can replenish itself that natural resource will decline. If you continue to take more than the area can replenish; eventually the resource will be gone. This a LAW and no amount of anti-environmentalist rants will change this TRUTH.
Anyway, enough time wasted responding to a troll...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
As we run low on fish, fishing becomes a less-viable source of life. Old fishermen find something else to do, or go on welfare, or are supported by their families. Their kids don't become fishermen to begin with. Within 50 years, fishing as a way of life dies out. Eventually, a few large boats keep fish stocks at a constant level, and provides the population with fish.
Obviously this didn't work with the Dodo (too convientent a food source for sailing crews) or the Passenger Pigeon. I was trying to keep this fairly simple so the original poster wouldn't get lost. What you say is true, but its also a lot more complicated than you indicate here.
One thing that's missing is the idea of genetic diversity. Some scientists say the Siberian tiger is already extinct (despite a few still walking around zoos and in the wild) because there is too little genetic diversity. Potentially, they are doomed to extinction via the tiger equivalent of hemophila, mental retardation, or other diseases of inbreeding. The Cheeta (sp?) also falls into this catagory. By the time our children are adults, both species will probably only be in zoos. By the time thier children are adults, both cats may exist only as DNA samples in government laboratories.
Sure, many species may reach a stable, free-market equilibrium with human harvesting of those species. If that equilibrium maintains a large enough pool of creatures that they can survive disease, non-human hunting (sea lions eating salmon, for example), and other pressures not associated with the act of harvesting these creatures (climate change, pollution, habitat loss) then we have reached the best solution. We get to enjoy the "harvest" like retirees living off the interest of their investment. I whole-heartedly support this kind of environmentalism. It's not the "animals good/humans bad" environmentalism that you seem to be complaining about, but the same kind of common sense that your accountant tries to get us to use when planning for our individual retirement.
However, there are other motivations. I personally can't go through life making every decision like life is a entry in an accounting ledger. If I have kids, I don't want to explain why tigers only exist in old picture books, I want to be able to take my kids out for an authentic maryland crabcake, and I want to be able show them western red ceders and redwoods that are hundreds of years old (it will be difficult to explain to a four-year-old how the indians used to carve canoes out of a tree if the only tree she has ever seen is a 6" diameter douglas fir on a tree farm). These are purely selfish reasons but they are definitely a motivation and I, personally, am willing to pay a bit more for my crab cakes, lumber, and salmon in the hopes that those things will still be around a century from now.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
We know about evolution, dinosaurs, the big-bang et al.
And how do we "know" indeed? Yes, that's right, because you've been told so! And who by? The liberals in charge of "educating" our young, that have made it impossible to have decent Christian teachings taught in schools because it would let people see the lies they have wrought throughout our society!
Creationism is a myth! There is not one scientific fact in creationism. Not one.
See how you've been indoctrinated into hate? That is the legacy of the liberal - hatred of their fellow man and a love of the State. See here for why Creationism is scientifically proven, and that currently cosmology is nothing more than a tool of the Godless in their purge of Christianity.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
As usual, wheneve the issue of ancient history (where ancient mean "before last Friday"), the flaming Jesus freaks emerge from their self-flagellating to inflict their disgusting morals and creation myths on rational people.
Of course we do. Whenever nonsense like this is released from another liberal brainwashing centre, then it is the duty of all concerned Christians to fight back, to show to people that the Truth of history is already out there in bookshops, churches and missions across the world!
For any truly rational person, persuing wild theories about hairy elephants and "giant lizards" is a waste of time and energy, and playing directly into the hands of the anti-humanist liberals.
Let me give you a hint: Science works. I don't need proof of that.
See how you have been brainwashed! You attack me for not having proof (despite it sitting here on my desk at work!) and then go on and claim science doesn't need any. How hypocritical of you! But then again, the Bible does warn about the hypocrites. Thankfully, they will receive their just reward.
Religion is a mind-controlling device invented by a certain Jewish huckster named Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago. 2000 years!
If you believe that, you are even more profoundly ignorant than I had thought.
There is *no* proof for any facet of creationism. Not one.
As I said before, radio halos found in granite, the decay rate of planetary magentic fields, the amount of interplanetary dust and many more. But you obviously haven't taken the time to find out these things, sure in your smug liberal ideology.
Why doesn't he open his big mouth anymore, Jon?
Why should be have to? All the evidence is already there!
Jon Erikson, IT guru
[I think this way because I believe everything I read.]
As Gas-Guzzling, Anti-Kyoto Americans, we should know this best. Ever since we handed those typhoid blankets to the land's original occupants, we have cut a swath of pollution and evil human influence across the continent.
Right now the ugliest ugly American is defending his oil-friendly policies to the more enlightened leaders of the EU. I bet they're making fun of him using words he doesn't understand. Ha.
Everyone tells me that human beings are bad for the environment, and why should I doubt them? If it weren't for us hunting the dodo to extinction, we would still be able to see that funny little bird hopping around in its non-adaptive fashion. I remember someone in a lab coat telling me that all of Nature is connected in a beautiul and delicate network. Even the macroscopic shifts in climate over the eons is probably caused by human under-arm odor or something. And since the guy was wearing a lab coat, I recommend we listen.
So, why can't we all just vanish and make the Earth pure again?
NOTICE: We will begin distributing the "magic pudding" at noon.
to accept our role? The Giant Moa (elephant bird) went extinct in New Guinea & points east about a thousand years ago - right after humans showed up.These disappearances had nothing to do with climate change. Plains Indians were hunting buffalo (sometimes) by setting fires and driving whole herds off cliffs. A great waste. They didn't pick them off one at a time by horseback until they acquired the horse from the European invaders. (The American horse had disappeared about 10000 years earlier.) You think we couldn't kill a mammoth with a pit, or a glyptodont with poison tree frog arrows? I watched a film of the Kung! of the Kalahari (bushmen) kill a giraffe with sharp sticks (and poison). This has nothing to do with "guilt" BTW; several postings have brought this up and there will be more. It's just that it's stupid, and self-destructive. A simplified biosphere is less robust. Like a cyberlandscape with only one OS available... variety is more flexible, and adaptable, and interesting. Sure, the biosystem recovered from the dinosaur extinction, but it took a coupla million years.
We are the first generation of Morlocks. Eat the rich!
In fact this theory has been around for 30 some years and in the middle of the article, one of the guys to whom the theory is atributed qualifies his argument in such a way to make it sound quite reasonableOF course, if you introduce a new predator into any closed or reasonably closed eco-system there will always be a draumatic result. Why would anyone be suprised by that...? It's not like ancient man had the tools nessecery to kill off a sufficient quantity of any animal as to drive it to extinction (unlike more modern man drove the american water buffalo to extinction - using more modern weapons like guns - imagine doing that with a knife or spear, in sufficient quantities to drive any animal to extinction).
But then the guy goes on.... he really does a masterful job of fence sitting here:Nah... That's not really plausable... Climate change could vary easily have contributed to the extinction. Look at Gloval Warming, or destruction of the Ozone Layer. These events represent large scal climatic events, but they are affecting different regions of the globe in different ways, and at different rates, baserd primarily based on proximity to the epicenter of the event (antarctica in the case of the largest Ozone Hole) and the pre-existing climate.
I have two problems with this article, first, it didn't cover the theory it strives to cover in a fair and non-judgemental fashion, and it presents it in the light of the enviromentalists versus the conservatives. Well, this is science. It is an exploration of historical events to try and determin fact. There are not politics to it and there are no accusations being made here that would impact modern man. No one is using this theory to try and band deer hunting, or something like that.
People need to relax and take science for what it's worth, rather than taking it so personally. The article it seems was designed to be inflamatory, co I can't fault the traders - perhaps that was the only way it found its way into the mainstream media in the us, after all, an earlier poster pointed out that the BBC had this story a week or more ago...--CTH
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It isn't our fault we started killing all these animals. I mean 4 millions years ago we were happy starving, surviving day to day. And then one day a weird black rectangle appeared in our cave entrance, and taught us to eat meat and beat the shit out of each other. We weren't smart enough to get the fact that we would have been better off starving, and being prey to the cheetah. Blame it on those damn monoliths. They did it!
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
The basic difference is: the early americans ate all the horses. Someplace near present-day Ukrainia, some of my ancestors learned to ride them instead, and the horse-riding peoples spread over Eurasia in waves of conquest (Celts, Hellenes, Huns, Goths, Normans, Mongols... Similarly, tameable breeds of camels, cows, sheep, goats, and donkeys were domesticated in Eurasia or Africa, but eaten in North America. The result 13,000 years later was that the europeans easily overwhelmed the native americans and took their land. Horses and a wider variety of farmable plants helped, but maybe the biggest difference was that with no tame meat animal except the dog, Indian towns had to stay small enough to allow farms nearby to grow the corn needed and the men to _walk_ to their hunting grounds, while much larger European cities were fed by cattle driven into town and grain hauled in by horse-drawn wagons. City life gave Europeans metal, gunpowder, government, large armies, measles, and smallpox, and all the Indians had to counter with was skill in the woods.
So when we drive another hundred species to extinction today, just what possible uses might we have missed?
It's difficult to imagine human populations in the few thousands somehow wiping out large indigenous species through over hunting. On the other hand, introduction of new diseases can be disastrous very rapidly. The article gives a brief mention of this possiblity, but it seems intent on promoting the concept of the inherent destructiveness of humanity.
Bob Bakker, the off-beat paleontologist, has been promoting disease scenarios for years as a primary cause of mass dinosaur extinctions. It seems a more probable cause in these cases of large mammalian extinctions as well.
---Any philosophy that can be put "in a nutshell" belongs there.---
How exactly is this +3 informative?
I know the rule about modding up stuff that adds to the discussion, and not if you necesarily agree with it, but come on, people.
I'd like to forward my own theory.
The Native Americans were beamed in here from the third moon of the planet Lothax, third planet in a star system 55 light years away. They arrived in the year 1996, but the reason why we believe they were here so much longer was that, working with the Godless Liberals, they devised a scheme where a mind-controlling memory chip was implanted in the mind of every person on earth, which contained false memories of the Native Americans being on earth for years and years. Implanted memories, like in Total Recall (where do you think Arnold got the idea from?)It's just an elaborate plan to make Honey Nut Cheerios sell better, since they are the main export of the planet Lothax.
The reason I know this is my brother's best friend's uncle's dogwalker's hairdresser used to live next door to the guy who mowed Arnold's lawn.
Do I have any other proof? Of course not.
Now lets see if this one gets modded up to +3 informative.
-Johnny 5000
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.