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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.
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)
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
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?
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!
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?