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Humans, Not Climate Change, Wiped Out Australian Megafauna (phys.org)
"New evidence involving the ancient poop of some of the huge and astonishing creatures that once roamed Australia indicates the primary cause of their extinction around 45,000 years ago was likely a result of humans, not climate change," reports Phys.org. schwit1 quotes their report on new analysis of a prehistoric sediment core from the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia.
The core contains chronological layers of material blown and washed into the ocean, including dust, pollen, ash and spores from a fungus called Sporormiella that thrived on the dung of plant-eating mammals, said CU Boulder Professor Gifford Miller, who participated in the study... Fungal spores from plant-eating mammal dung were abundant in the sediment core layers from 150,000 years ago to about 45,000 years ago, when they went into a nosedive, said Miller... "The abundance of these spores is good evidence for a lot of large mammals on the southwestern Australian landscape up until about 45,000 years ago," he said. "Then, in a window of time lasting just a few thousand years, the megafauna population collapsed."
The Australian collection of megafauna some 50,000 years ago included 1,000-pound kangaroos, 2-ton wombats, 25-foot-long lizards, 400-pound flightless birds, 300-pound marsupial lions and Volkswagen-sized tortoises. More than 85 percent of Australia's mammals, birds and reptiles weighing over 100 pounds went extinct shortly after the arrival of the first humans, said Miller... "There is no evidence of significant climate change during the time of the megafauna extinction."
The article adds that last year Miller also identified the first direct evidence that humans preyed on Australian megafauna -- burned eggshells from a 400-pound bird.
The Australian collection of megafauna some 50,000 years ago included 1,000-pound kangaroos, 2-ton wombats, 25-foot-long lizards, 400-pound flightless birds, 300-pound marsupial lions and Volkswagen-sized tortoises. More than 85 percent of Australia's mammals, birds and reptiles weighing over 100 pounds went extinct shortly after the arrival of the first humans, said Miller... "There is no evidence of significant climate change during the time of the megafauna extinction."
The article adds that last year Miller also identified the first direct evidence that humans preyed on Australian megafauna -- burned eggshells from a 400-pound bird.
This reminds me of cheesy old movies and TV shows about primitive "cave men" constantly on the run from predatory dinosaurs -- Land of the Lost, Land That Time Forgot, etc. Except I think now we see that it would have been the dinosaurs doing the running, while the cave women back home got the BBQ pits warmed up.
The abos are not so innocent as the liberals want to portray them after all.
How long before people find a way to blame white males anyway?
Serene, peaceful, in tune with nature, never takes more than he gives... And wipes out numerous complete (and unique) species.
Considering that Europeans still have to suffer demands for reparation for such things as slavery, colonisation, and the crusades, one cannot help but wonder if a demand for compensation for the irreparable damage to the ecosystem made by the aboriginals is also possible.
They were probably delicious.
Mostly random stuff.
Get too big for yo bitches ... some maleness is gonna put yo face in stitches. BURMASHAVE.
Global Warming is scam by China to make manufacturing in the west not worthwhile. This is according to our PRESIDENT Donald John Trump
"Humans, Not Climate Change, Wiped Out..."
Feel like we're splitting hairs here.
We can look to our recent history and see the same extinction process created by man. The passenger pigeon, Tasmanian tiger, the Dodo, Great auk, Quaggas, Carolina parakeet and so on. Even today there are several species who are literally on the brink of going extinct, including the northern white rhino of which the last known male of its species is under 24 hour guard to protect it from poachers. Had it not been for Teddy Roosevelt, the American bison would most likely also be extinct, slaughtered by the literal tens of thousands as short as 130 years ago.
Man-made extinction also occurs in human populations. How many different Native American tribes were exterminated either because of Europeans or their Native American allies? How about those of Central and South America or those in the Far East?
We can see the same extinction process in places like Borneo where the habitat of orangutans is being wiped out due to illegal farming or clear cutting for palm oil trees, and similar processes under way in Madagascar where many animals exist in no other place on the planet, such as the ring-tailed lemur of which only an estimated 2,500 still survive.
Anyone who says man doesn't and can't have an effect on the environment is simply blind to reality.
Volcanoes co2 emissions lessen as planet still cools, plants who depend on rich co2 die back, less o2 emitted, less breathable air, animals tend to have a small air inway, o2/fuel requirements to keep a 1000lb animal active > available resources = most don't make it
Humanity Duck Yeah!
How could white males have made it to Australia so long ago?
I would've eaten them big animals too. It's a lot of meat for not too much work. You also get hides, bones, sinews, bladders, all kinds of useful stuff.
but there is no prove that it was people. People are just a strong possibility when you eliminate the other choices are been less possible. But it should be noted that humans live in African for hundreds of thousands of years and Africans mega fauna survived. It is possible that a short lived disaster could have caused the die off. Something like a nearby super volcano or an asteroid impact.
So there's species where there one last creature standing on the edge of a cliff ready to cast over the edge and with its own death rendering its species extinct?
No. "On the brink of going extinct" is a perfectly good idiom describing what I think you meant to describe. Adding "literally" to it makes it just silly.
So he wasn't "lying", he just wasn't saying what you were meant to think he was.
As a member of staff under the administration of our fearless leader Donald J. "The Ratings Machine" Trump I call BS on this story.
The first idea was nonsense, I mean climate change? come on! but now you're blaming innocent people.
For the 100th time. It never happened! -scientists are in cahoots with journalists to invent stuff that never existed only to claim extinction for some ratings and drama.
Who are you going to believe?? The POTUS or fake news?!
Here's the thing: the upside of inventing a writing system is world domination; the downside is finally having to admit in public that you are a real ass (and always have been).
In the above, "you" is a set of nesting dolls, innermost being the fifty-year-old white male technocrats of western European origin who treat Wikipedia as their private, personal playgrounds (thence to aging white European males, white European males, white males, whites altogether, etc.)
Here's the second thing: after a society invents writing, soon the society has written myths (with serious legacy entrenchment) that innocence preceded the current sad state of affairs (how-far-I-have-fallen porn, not that the larger consequences can't be remedied by kneeling under the right cumulus cloud for a thoroughly abject sixty seconds).
Society will re-invent writing over and over again (movable type, Movable Type) before the reversal of true illumination makes the least headway: that the human asshole apogee was attained circa the advent of the original edged weapon.
As far as the abos go, they all need to repeat to themselves "there but for the grace of God go I", unless they think their ancestors truly enlightened enough to not have had even the most remote possibility of inventing any form of written record, whatsoever (best if you're not much past the wreathie leafy loin cloth, because any loose thread threatens to quipu a long record, and then immediately you're on the outie asshole train along with every other post-prehistoric posse of mugs, pugs, and thugs).
Some days you are the adaptee, some days the adapter.
This story is a bunch of hog wash. There wasn't a human population large enough to destroy the megafauna.
Here is a recent contrary view, where they dated a mega-wombat fossil to 17000 years after the arrival of humans at that location. (However, if web search results are anything to go by, the human-caused-extinction hypothesis seems much more popular.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Maybe the noble savage really is "serene, peaceful, in tune with nature, never takes more than he gives", precisely because their ancestors learned such a hard lesson and taught their descendants "don't mess up like we did". (I'm not saying it is so, just that it is consistent with the observation of prehistorical extinctions.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Took the aborigines thousands of years, we've done worse in a couple of hundred years
Go well
Because burnt eggshells proves humans did it! Never could they have been burnt by a forest fire. HERP DERP for science. Dem humans be to blame.
Huge hootered cavewomen! At least Ringo was a better actor than he was a drummer.
Zugzug you.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Reasonably good science work, horrible assumptions, junk conclusions. We know that there are fossils of huge mammals (and humans, not the hoaxes but actual fossils) that still live today only much smaller, not just Australia but all over the globe. What caused these mammals to get a lot smaller? Given the fact that physics says that many of these mammals were so large that they would barely function on today's atmospheric density and composition, it is highly likely that at some point in the past the atmosphere was much denser and/or much higher in oxygen than it is now, which would support the cardiovascular systems of the fossils we find (dinosaur and mammal). Couple this with the fact that almost the entire planet has sedimentary rock and fossils within those sedimentary layers, and that sedimentary rock can be deposited rapidly under cataclysmic conditions and things begin to fall into place.
The best theory that I have heard goes something like this:
Before 6000 years ago, there was an ice shell around the outer atmosphere, which at the time only extended up 10-20 miles instead of 60 miles. Atmospheric pressure was higher and the ice shell filtered out most harmful radiation that now comes down to the surface. Because there was no radiation getting through, there was zero C14 [C14 is generated in the upper atmosphere by ionizing radiation; C14 decays at a constant rate; EVIDENCE AND OBSERVATION (not speculation) points to a continuous generation rate of C14]. We have observed that C14 rates are still increasing, and based on the rate of increase and the current levels, C14 production began around 6000 years ago and will reach equilibrium in around 24,000 years. Thus we know reasonably well that the planet was significantly different before 6000 years ago.
Oxygen content was maybe 30%. The planet was roughly flat with the largest mountains being only a few hundred feet or so and the tectonic plates all had massive underground water pockets supporting them, similar to all continents today with trapped underground reservoirs, only much larger. Around 6000 years ago, a nitrogen comet struck the planet (mostly broke up in the atmosphere due to the nature of nitrogen ice) somewhere around Siberia, crushing the atmospheric ice shell and causing massive shear on the planet and a planet wide temperature crash. Mammoths in Siberia found frozen solid with green food in their mouths and stomachs support this hypothesis, seeing that it takes temperatures around -180C to flash freeze an animal of that size, where attempting to freeze it in the coldest sustained polar temperatures (-50C) would cause the insides to rot before they froze. The comet diluted the oxygen atmosphere to 20%, and the cold caused immediate global rain.
The shear imparted by the impact caused massive earth quakes that caused a catastrophic failure of many underground oceans, which came jetting to the surface very hot and very fast, with the pressure of entire continents behind the flow. If these jets occurred on an ocean floor, they instantly killed the animals around the jet for miles, from whales to microorganisms, which fell to the ocean floor by the ton and formed diatomaceous earth deposits. Ask anyone who has ever worked at one of these mines, they constantly find all manner of sea fossils, including whales and other huge fossils sometimes buried vertically down through the deposit. The collapse of the ice shell, global drop in temperature and massive release of underwater reserves caused the entire planet to be covered in water. Almost everything on the planet died except for one man and his family and a baby pair of every kind (not species, kind: i.e. wolf/dog/coyote/dingo etc are all one kind).
There are over 200 flood legends globally, and nearly all of them describe a global flood (95%) where one family of 8 people survived (88%). In one of the oldest languages, early Chinese, the word for boat is pictographic and is literally a vessel with 8 people. These people survived on this boat for about a ye
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
They knew it would eventually turn into Istanbul. They were just ahead of the curve.
Bizarre thing. Until a few years ago I thought it was Istamul. Nobody ever called me on it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
FTFY.
Isn't climate change caused by humans too?
An often overlooked side effect from the megafauna extinction is the increase in drop bear numbers which followed the
extinction of their natural predators. It has been suggested that the aversion of drop bears
to the odor of vegemite was an early behavioral adaption to avoid the giant wombat, whose fossilized feces show a chemical composition very similar to vegemite (remarkably, whether fossilized or not).
If your species can not out run, out breed, out eat, or out live what wants to eat you, the worst survival strategy your species can have is to be tasty.
Tasting good is not a survival strategy.
Ausfag here. Despite the 'Noble Savage' rubbish that comes out of academia today, dutifully lavishing praise upon the Australian Abo for his 'kinship with the land', reality is vastly different: the Abo was (and still is) a tremendously destructive force upon Australian flora and fauna as this article demonstrates clearly. Truth has given way to political correctness in the modern era, however, and in academic circles today the Abo can do no wrong. Going back just three decades one can find a wealth of information to counter today's narrative, but today it is nowhere to be found. Anything not strictly positive about the Abo has been suppressed, in a manner truly Orwellian: the unspoken rule being that it is not to be spoken of.
While academics from Monash University contributed to the findings, funding for the research came from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the German Research Foundation, meaning that, unlike purely Australian-funded research, they were unable to paint it over with an explicitly pro-Abo narrative. The article was clearly written from the perspective of the human element of climate change, and the non-Australian co-authors didn't know (or didn't care) that they were treading upon sacred ground.
I can't wait to see how the ABC and other progressive Australian media will try to spin this one. It will prove most entertaining - if indeed they try. More than likely this research will be consigned to the memory-hole. Then we Aussies can happily go back to worshiping the Abo, and hating ourselves, per usual.
Maybe the headline should read, "Researchers confirm tradition theory of megafauna extinction - "We ate them.""?
The best Australian megafauna name ever: the Demon Duck of Doom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullockornis
This is one of those situations where there really was a difference between "climate change" and "global warming". The default position about 200 years ago was what Inhofe has reiterated: that humans cannot change the climate, and more generally that the climate has regular periodic cycles which even out in the long run. That was even the default position when Mr. Inhofe was schooled -- there are textbooks printed in 1950 that say as much. The one I saw was by Addison Wesley, and it explicitly assigned CO2 to a minor role.
However, about 200 years ago, there was a growing body of evidence that the climate *had* been different in the past, and specifically for large Ice Ages. So our early theories of climate change, from say the 1830s to the 1930s, were mostly trying to explain Ice Ages, and that is actually what the originator of the CO2-based theory of climate change was studying. He based his study on the laws of atmospheric gases revealed by Tyndall in the mid-19th Century. His theory was completely discredited for a couple of reasons that were later overturned, but other lines of evidence and better observations eventually overturned both the theory that climate could not change and that humans could not change it. If Mr. Inhofe has not learned anything since his schoolboy days about climate, then he should be ashamed. If he is knowingly repeating falsehoods he should be removed from office.
Hmph. Fossils show that fauna have been becoming extinct for millions of years, therefore it can't be anthropogenic. It's just part of cyclical nature. Did these so called scientists ever investigate whether the sun was the cause of these extinctions? No, that would be too simple and obvious and would not fit their predefined liberal antihunting agenda. This is just a ploy by the paleontologists to keep the grant money coming in. They can't explain why there has been a pause in the extinction of megafauna for 16 years now.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The answer is that they were made into Ribwiches. Delicious, euphoria inducing, pupil dilating, Ribwiches! That is all.
http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Ribwich
Mmmmm... Ribwiches!