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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.
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.
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?
No shit.
I remember all those wonderful stories back in elementary about Iroquois making longhouses and how every few year's they'd move to another one.
Those stories about the wonderful life of those Native Americans kinda left out the fact that the Iroquois had to move because they stripped the local area completely bare.
Oooopsie. We can't paint those noble savages as anything other than superior to white people - because only white people strip the world of its resources!</SARCASM>
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.
Those stories about the wonderful life of those Native Americans kinda left out the fact that the Iroquois had to move because they stripped the local area completely bare.
As long as it's a moderately small area that's affected, and it regrows after the humans have moved to a new area allowing people to return again after some years, that's a perfectly sustainable approach.
Tell that to the mammoths and sabretooths.
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.
That's a ridiculous statement.
The crusades were the response to muslim invasions of various christian holdings, in combination with an attempt at weakening the muslim hold over trade from asia, and also simultaneously gaining favor with Rome.
If any persecuted people were saved by the crusades that was purely incidental.
> It is possible that a short lived disaster could have caused the die off. Something like a nearby super volcano or an asteroid impact.
They found evidence of a constant decrease in populations over thousands of years, without a corresponding climatic change. It is possible, or perhaps likely that a event like that finished them off. But something other than climate change pushed these local populations to the brink first, and it started at the same time as humans showed up.
But it should be noted that humans live in African for hundreds of thousands of years and Africans mega fauna survived
Not the same thing at all. Humans evolved alongside other fauna in Africa for millions of years; they arrived in Australia fully armed as a dominant predator.
The difference being that the animals didn't know that the sensible thing to do was run away really really fast?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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).
Care to jive that with the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Pretty much my experience of having to go to church as a kid. There were a few fanatical true believers, and everyone else did it because of some variant of Pascal's Wager. I finally dropped out of the whole thing when I was sixteen, not for any noble reason but mainly because I wanted to smoke and have sex, but even at that age at least part of the reason for my rejection was that my family's church had absolutely absurd beliefs, in particular their view on evolution. I had secretly accepted evolution since I was nine years old and had read a book in the school library on the evolution of humans from Australopithecus onward, but nine year olds don't have the personal authority to tell their parents and their religious authorities that they're all full of shit, whereas a sixteen year old has the right combination of hormones and hubris to brazenly tell everyone "Your beliefs are beyond absurd, and border on the criminally idiotic."
It might have gone a bit differently if I were raised in a more mainstream church like Catholicism, Lutheranism or Anglicanism, where they do try to keep the idiocy to a minimum, but in the more wingnut Protestant churches, the maniacal stupidity just drove me away. At the end of it I became I guess what one would describe as a "weak atheist" bordering on agnostic. I know the existence of Yahweh can never be disproven, but I see absolutely no reason at all that such a being need be invoked, and whenever I see Yahweh invoked by Christians, Muslims and Jews, it's often to justify something noxious, or to prop up the weak-minded who need constant reminders that prostrating themselves to the deacon now means eternal salvation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Then as now, Muslims were murderous expansionists. The Crusades, in part, were a response to aggression.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
When were aboriginal people portrayed as innocent? Aboriginal people were portrayed as living off the land which is factual. Some of them were nomadic, too so agriculture is probably not how they survived.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yet, you got lied to and believed that climate change wiped out the Australian megafauna.
Lied to? By whom? Seems like Human impact has been the favoured explanation since before the turn of the century: Pleistocene Extinction of Genyornis newtoni: Human Impact on Australian Megafauna. Largely on account of the fact that climate change was modest over the period of extinction: "More than 700 dates on Genyornis eggshells from three different climate regions document the continuous presence of Genyornis from more than 100,000 years ago until their sudden disappearance 50,000 years ago, about the same time that humans arrived in Australia. Simultaneous extinction of Genyornis at all sites during an interval of modest climate change implies that human impact, not climate, was responsible."
Most people were probably not aware of this one way or another before reading this Slashdot post. Those that looked it up on Wikipedia would have found that Humans are thought to be the cause: "Analysis of oxygen and carbon isotopes from teeth of megafauna indicate the regional climates at the time of extinction were similar to arid regional climates of today and that the megafauna were well adapted to arid climates.[5] The dates derived have been interpreted as suggesting that the main mechanism for extinction was human burning of a landscape that was then much less fire-adapted; oxygen and carbon isotopes of teeth indicate sudden, drastic, non-climate-related changes in vegetation and in the diet of surviving marsupial species. However, early Australian Aborigines appear to have rapidly eliminated the megafauna of Tasmania about 41,000 years ago (following formation of a land bridge to Australia about 43,000 years ago as ice age sea levels declined) without using fire to modify the environment there,[7][8][9] implying that at least in this case hunting was the most important factor. It has also been suggested that the vegetational changes that occurred on the mainland were a consequence, rather than a cause, of the elimination of the megafauna.
So do *you* care to jive the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople with your statement?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Pretty much.
Plus the lack of thing that had evolved to kill humans in Australia. No tse-tse flies, for instance....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
My Dad never liked doing it, and when he figured out that I was strong enough, he asked if I liked church, which I didn't particularly, and the stories made no sense at all to me.
"Fine," he said, "you don't have to go then, but if you stay home you'll have to get that lawn mowed".
I really didn't mind, I've always liked doing that job.
Oh, and Rev. Johnston, if you're reading this, if you want kids to accept your faith, don't tell them the story of the burning bush. It just makes your god out to be a total dick.
Took the aborigines thousands of years, we've done worse in a couple of hundred years
Go well
There was some climate change occurring as a result of the widening gap between South America an Antartica at Tierra del Fuego. The increase in water flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current helps with the deforestation of Australia. There was a major event that widened the gap about 100,000 to 50,000 years ago which might have led to the migration to Australia. As the water flow increases, southern Australia will get drier.
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'
Australia wildlife now being entirely care (bears/spiders/snakes)?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In this case the conclusion is both right and wrong. They are right to claim Native Australians (not the adjective people), did cause that extinction. However they were societies under stress due to the ice age onset and so, while they were once stable in their ecology, that stability was disturbed by an ice age.
Lets see how modern humanity copes with massive flooding or massive freezing before the judge members of the original Australian nations (not the adjective people).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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."
Where the hell did you get that? Yes, there were people driven by religious zeal and whatnot, but for most of the European nobility the crusades were a chance to conquer a land for themselves, for as second born they had no claim to the land the firstborn got.
If you go down the list of noble participants of the various crusades, you will come up with a handful of landed leaders who wanted to ensure that the new "owners" will swear fealty to them and a huge number of landless nobles who wanted some.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For this to work, gravity would have to be some kind of non-binding suggestion instead of a law. And that's just the tip of the ice berg why this won't fly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
but there is no prove that it was people.
(excited Arnold Rimmer voice) ALIENS!
Also to note the Crusades were not really about saving Jerusalem from those evil Muslims as some would like people to think. Jerusalem was under Arab rule starting in 638. The first Crusade was 1095. While news in the old world didn't travel fast, do you believe it took 400 years for the Christians in Europe to learn their beloved holy city was under Arab rule? Another thing to note: Jews fought along side Muslims against Christians in the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Politically incorrect facts like these are not taught at school. So they do not exist.
You don't see the problem with the ice shell and the other fantasy elements?
Why can't there be a God if the world is older than 6000 years old? Is your version of God really that puny?
Three of the four people who discredited the global flood fossil theory were ordained Anglican Priests FFS and they didn't think God was so puny that he would cease to exist just because some people were reading the Bible the wrong way.
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
Plants are stupid. They should all die.
I laugh at the thought that some plants have suffered sub-optimal, even stunted growth in the run up to the Industrial Revolution. For many plants CO2 was almost down to 'gasping' level. It is funny to imagine plants gasping and panicking for breath. I am angry at volcanoes for helping to feed plants now and then, but at least volcanoes blot out the sun and lengthen Winter so you can imagine nasty plant things suffering in other ways too. Now Trump man comes along and wants to feed the plants with more fossil fuel and stirring up swamp gas. He should mind his own business and leave the plants alone. Did you know that if you move a house plant a little farther from the window every day it will begin to lean towards it? Then all of a sudden you turn the pot around. It's hilarious!
I hate plants. Plants are stupid.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Like what? How is any of this political?
Maybe the headline should read, "Researchers confirm tradition theory of megafauna extinction - "We ate them.""?
Commonly accepted by who? The science has favoured Human impact as the explanation since before the turn of the century. Even Wikipedia shows this as the consensus view.
Maybe this is an Australian thing? This idealized view of the native community would probably be considered mildly racist elsewhere.
So is that why everything left overcompensates in the killing humans department?
be gone bigot.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Where the hell did you get that? Yes, there were people driven by religious zeal and whatnot, but for most of the European nobility the crusades were a chance to conquer a land for themselves, for as second born they had no claim to the land the firstborn got.
If you go down the list of noble participants of the various crusades, you will come up with a handful of landed leaders who wanted to ensure that the new "owners" will swear fealty to them and a huge number of landless nobles who wanted some.
Yes, religion was just the excuse used. As Napoleon sad "A man does not get himself killed for a piece of ribbon or a petty distinction, you must speak to the soul to electrify him". Men fought the crusades in the name of god, but the benefit of a few leaders, of course people being people, if told the truth would never have travelled half way around the world to fight and die for a few rich arseholes who were just being greedy, so they turn it into a holy war to get the peasantry whipped up into a frenzy.
You know what, in the intervening 500 odd years, little has changed. Religious wars are still fought for the benefit of a few powerful arseholes. There is no such thing as a innately violent religion, only men who twist it to their designs. The only real change in this method is that some leaders have been forced to use newer justifications to get people to go to war for the benefit of rich arseholes, religion having fallen out of favour with the local populace.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The best Australian megafauna name ever: the Demon Duck of Doom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullockornis
I'll tell the bison it's not our fault if you tell the passenger pigeons.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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.
Has anybody eliminated the possibility that it was Ewoks?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
http://www.angelfire.com/mech/...
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
That's what happens when people let their pet sabertooths out at night.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
How do you get sedimentary and igneous rocks in 6000 years?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I meant sedimentary and metamorphic.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The ideas behind "three strikes" laws have approximately nothing to do with the reasons doctors want patients to take an entire course of antibiotics, and I don't see what either has to do with the Crusades.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
> The only problem with this story is that it supports the Biblical account of the flood
,and 6,939 years in England. The consistency of these two independent dendrochronological sequences has been supported through comparison of their radiocarbon and dendrochronological ages. Another fully anchored chronology that extends back 8500 years exists for the bristlecone pine in the Southwest US (White Mountains of California)." These tree rings have been corroborated with carbon-14 dates (each reinforces the other).
No, the only problem with this story is that there are literal mountains of evidence against it.
For starters, there are overlapping tree ring data going back about 12,000 years in Germany, where the carbon dates agree well with the observed counts of the tree rings, and over 8000 years in California. From the wikipedia Dendrochronology page: "A fully anchored and cross-matched oak and pine chronology in central Europe extends back 12,460 years, and an oak chronology goes back 7,429 years in Ireland
Likewise, there is a Japanese lake Suigetsu that has deposited annual layers of algae and diatoms, distinctly different in the summer and winter layers, that can be counted and measured with carbon-14 dates. This lake has over 45,000 annual layers that agree well with the corresponding carbon-14 dates.
I'd suggest reading not just sources that agree with a pre-conceived timeline, but also those that disagree. If approached without cherry-picking, I think you'll find that the overwhelming quantity of evidence for the timeline that scientists have established is persuasive. It is perfectly possible to be a person of faith without adhering to a literal approach to scripture. (Suggestion: perhaps the biblical flood account did happen, but it was a more localized event.)
I doubt it. To fear christ one would have to believe in him. And believe very strange things about him to boot.
It is for horses, chickens, sheep, cows and pigs.....
If your species can not out run, out breed, out eat, or out live mankind, the best survival strategy your species can have is to be tasty or useful.
It means: those abos are not people, but People, communal being.
But it should be noted that humans live in African for hundreds of thousands of years and Africans mega fauna survived.
As someone else noted, humans evolving in Africa gave the local megafauna time to learn to avoid us. There's a direct statistical correlation between the percentage of megafauna driven extinct and the distance from the site of human origins. African megafauna suffered the least, European and Asian less so, but Australian, North American, and South American megafauna got hit really hard. The idea is very popular that those continents not explored until humans were fully modern explain why most of those megafauna went extinct.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay