But if the explanation for the allegedly easy killability of North American and European megafauna is that they weren't sufficiently fearful, then why are their African counterparts so violent? They should have become extinct long, long ago, according to the theory. Crocodiles still chow down on human beings regularly.
In the case of Wrangel and Madagascar, I hypothesize that the factor may be low population size. These are islands (OK, Madagascar is a big one) with correspondingly low populations of megafauna, and therefore easy to wipe out. In the case of e.g. Europe (and all of enormous Siberia) in the Ice Ages, what kind of human population was there at the time relative to that of the megafauna? I have a difficult time imagining a few tens of thousands of stone age people eliminating mammoths across two entire continents (one of which is almost as wide as the Atlantic Ocean).
--- On Fri, 12/26/08, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Wherefore art thou, Megafauna? (human predation)
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, December 26, 2008, 6:34 AM
> I agree they're aggressive, but might this be a common
> character of African fauna because it's an evolutionary
> response to several million years of human pressure? Again,
> African species are, for some reason, difficult to control.
> Asian buffalo has been domesticated, but not African. Asian
> elephants can be tamed, but not their African counterparts.
>
> Another interesting piece of evidence comes from island
> survivals. If megafauna extinctions were due to climate
> change, and not human "overkill", one would expect
> island species to go extinct contemporaneously with their
> mainland cousins. This is not the case, however. Mammoths
> persisted on Wrangel Island until merely four thousand years
> ago. Coincidentally, this is also roughly when humans first
> arrived on the island. Again, ground sloths became extinct
> on mainland North and South America from maybe 11,000 to
> 8,000 years before present, during the time when
> paleoindians first settled the hemisphere. However, humans
> didn't have the boats and navigational skills to reach
> the Caribbean until 4,000 years ago, which is about when
> ground sloths and other large animals became extinct there.
> Meanwhile, large animals on islands like Madagascar
> (elephant birds, giant lemurs, giant tortoises, pygmy
> hippos) and New Zealand (moas, giant eagles) never suffered
> extinction until a mere thousand or less years ago,
> because people didn't arrive there until that time.
>
> I'm not going to argue that the entire array of
> megafaunal extinctions was entirely due to anthropogenic
> reasons, the evidence is not that strong. But overall, I
> think that Pleistocene/Holocene hunter gatherers had a more
> pronounced effect on ecology than we've tended to give
> them credit for, especially in the environmentalist left.
>
>
>
>
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