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Dinesh / Photos

Years ago

The Extinction of large mammals and flightless birds coincided closely with the arrival of humans in North America, Madagascar, and New Zealand, and less decisively earlier in Australia. In Africa, where humans and animals evolved together for million of years, the damage was less severe.
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Dinesh said:

Some 73 percent of the large mammals genera that lived in the late Pleistocene are extinct. . . . The collapse of diversity occurred about the same time that the first Paleo-Indians hunters entered the New world, 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, and then spread southward at an average rate of 16 kilometers a year, It was not a casual, up-and-down event. Mammoths had flourished for two million years to that time and were represented at the end of three species – the Columbian, imperial, and wooly. Within a thousand years all were gone. The ground sloths, another ancient race, vanished almost simultaneously. The last known surviving populating, foraging out the caves in the western end of the Grand Canyon, disappeared about 10,000 years ago. ~ Page 387

In 1989 Jared Diamond summed up for the prosecution in the case of extinguished megafaunas. Climate, he said cannot be the principal culprit. He asked: how could changes in climate and vegetation during the retreat of the last glacier lead to mass extinction in North America but not in Europe and Asia? The difference between the land masses were not climatic but the first-time colonization of America, confronting a megafauna with no previous experience of human hunters. And in North America, why did this hecatomb occur at the end of the last glacial cycle, which closed the Quaternary period, but not at the end of the twenty-two glarical cycles preceding it? Again, the difference was the coming of the Paleo-Indians hunters. How, Diamond pressed, did Australia’s reptiles manage of survive the prehistoric human invasions better, as did the smaller mammals and birds? and , finally why did such large forms at the marsupial wolf nd giant kangaroo disappear about the same time from both Australia’s arid interior and rain forests, as well as from nearly New Guinea’s wet mountain forests? ~ Page 392
3 years ago

Dinesh said:

3 years ago ( translate )

Dinesh said:

Use of fire
3 years ago ( translate )
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