We are the megafauna. [cue ominous music].
I’d prefer restoring the species with the best chance of surviving.
I don’t see how pseudo-restoring a chimera species that doesn’t fit the habitat that exists now does that in any way.
The goal would be to restore the destroyed habitat.
Even assuming the Ecosystem Hypothesis is correct and the Climatic isn’t, you’re still going to need a large population of these pseudomammoths - which can only be sustained in the wild by mammoth steppe. But you can’t have the mammoth steppe without the mammoths. So how is that conundrum going to be resolved?
And why should we even bother? Better to spend the effort on saving the actual contemporary elephants we can still do something about.
If it’s feasible and at all practical mammoths have a good chance of being revived because they are cool. People will pay to see mammoths come back. The sins of our fathers and any theories about a better species to revive won’t matter if we don’t pay an extraordinary sum of money for such a task.
I think the idea is that existing species can get you part of the way towards recreating the steppe, enough for mammoth hybrids to survive and then the mammoths will further strengthen the ecosystem.
There are places like the Ukok plateau which are considered remnants of the mammoth steppe, while obviously not having any mammoths.
Like science writer Peter Hadfield (AKA Potholer54 in YouTube) points at many times one has to look at what kind of scientists are the ones pushing for this, as soon as one noticed that they are geneticists proposing that, the popular press should had raised their skeptical shields, but popular media always fall for what it will be the best click bait, it is not only the tabloids or misleading websites that do that.
Ok, let me try this again, since even the dumbest reporters must at some time have contracted an embarrassing medical condition and visited a hospital why is the specialization of Sciences such a hard concept to grasp?
If you had a skin rash you wouldn’t go to a climatologist to be cured any more than you’d go to a doctor to learn the facts about climate; and surely we understand that medical experts like all scientists specialize further within the field of medicine. With a skin rash you wouldn’t go to an immunologist or an audiologist, a pediatrician or a podiatrist, a gynecologist and obstetrician a cardiologist a neurologist or any other of the medical disciplines you’d go to a dermatologist; the same goes for fields like meteorology and geophysics, which also encompass a huge number of specialist fields. Most graduates in these subjects don’t go on to study climate.
Seems to me that the the geneticists already have funding to attempt to do their Jurassic Pleistocene park, so by reading further I will go on a limb and say it: This is a case where those geneticists attempt to drown the very pertinent criticisms coming from other geneticists and ecologists and try to get funding from other groups concerned about the environment. The group here is attempting to hitch a ride on the very important issue of climate change. To be really taken seriously they needed first to get a joint study from simulators, ecologists, geologists and climate scientists before going out of their area of expertise and claim that they will help with that larger issue. Sticking to genetics would had been better even if it is harder for them to justify what they are trying to do in their respective field.
The We wiped out" is rather doubtful and scientists debate on whether ir was Humans, human caused issues or climate change. North America use to tbe the poster boy since it seemed like a coincidence- much megafauna went extinct at the time humans arrive. However, we now know humans arrived much earlier in NA than 10K years ago.
Some things were just one species pushing out another- the grey wolf arrived also and pushed out the dire wolf, the bison arrived and pushed out the long horned bison. Maybe due to the fact they competed better, maybe due to the fact they competed better in the new climate.
The overkill hypothesis has been totally discredited. That doesnt mean human hunting didnt play a part, of course. (and in places like New Zealand, it was the critical point), but scientists are now leaning more towards climate change:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/01/what-killed-great-beasts-north-america
Until about 11,000 years ago, mammoths, giant beavers, and other massive mammals roamed North America. Many researchers have blamed their demise on incoming Paleoindians, the first Americans, who allegedly hunted them to extinction. But a new study fingers climate and environmental changes instead. The findings could have implications for conservation strategies, including controversial proposals for “rewilding” lions and elephants into North America.
The idea that humans wiped out North America’s giant mammals, or megafauna, is known as the “overkill hypothesis.” First proposed by geoscientist Paul Martin more than 40 years ago, it was inspired in part by advances in radiocarbon dating, which seemed to indicate an overlap between the arrival of the first humans in North America and the demise of the great mammals. But over the years, a number of archaeologists have challenged the idea on several grounds. For example, some researchers have argued that out of 36 animals that went extinct, only two—the mammoth and the mastodon—show clear signs of having been hunted, such as cuts on their bones made by stone tools. Others have pointed to correlations between the timing of the extinctions and dramatic fluctuations in temperatures as the last ice age came to a halting close.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/46/28555
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07897-1
Are Humans to Blame for the Disappearance of Earth’s Fantastic Beasts
First proposed in 1966 by paleontologist Paul Martin, this “overkill hypothesis” stated that the arrival of modern humans in each new part of the world brought with it the extinction of all those huge animals, whether through hunting them or outcompeting them. The hypothesis paints humans as a potent force of destruction and was highly controversial when Martin first proposed it. But over time it gained traction—though never full consensus—in the archaeological community.
Today, some archaeologists continue to fight back. For many of these Pleistocene extinctions, humans probably aren’t to blame, says archaeologist Ben Marwick. The key to his argument is timing: Marwick and other researchers recently found human artifacts in the Madjedbebe rock shelter in northern Australian that indicate humans came to the island 65,000 years ago, 10,000 years earlier than previously believed. That’s critical, because Australian megafauna didn’t start going extinct until sometime between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago.
The new data “puts people on the landscape well before megafauna started suffering population stress and showing signs of extinction,” Markwick says. “It’s like the alibi for humans: It absolves them of central responsibility.”
Not sure about that, IMHO showing that humans arrived earlier would point more to humans being a bigger factor. Reason being that it takes a lot of time and growth for humans to begin to make a difference to an ecosystem in pre-industrial times. BTW last time I checked I remember reading research that pointed at climate to be a big factor indeed, but then what happened was that as the mega fauna ecosystem was going smaller or going to pot, the humans were then the coup the grace.
Yep, my understanding is climate changes hammered species for hundreds of thousands of years as it cycled, but they’d generally bounce back. Humans showed up during a time where climate strained these animals anyhow and boom, they couldn’t recover.
Well there are four cites there.
That in the end say “Probably” like a good scientist does.
As other studies I saw, what you cited does not deny what others concluded since they do also acknowledge the climate changes happening then.
We therefore conclude there is no temporal association between climatically driven environmental changes and megafaunal extinction in the south-west region. There is also no indication in our data that the megafauna suffered a slow demise commensurate with increases in aridity. Furthermore, our data show no impact on megafauna presence of the marked stepwise increases in aridity over the longer term (during a full glacial cycle). This work adds to a growing body of evidence showing similar timing for extinction in the south-west of Australia as for extinction at sites in central9,10, southern36 and north-eastern Australia35, as well as continent-wide extinction of all megafauna by ∼46 kyr ago (ref. 15).
The debate over megafaunal extinction causes has consistently been between climate and humans. Having eliminated climate as the primary cause of extinction, we turn to consideration of human causation, of which hunting is most favoured as extinction driver. In Australia, there are no reported kill sites to indicate concentrated hunting efforts (other than transient sites where humans gathered and consumed Genyornis eggs) or widespread slaughter of megafauna. However, this does not disprove that human hunting took place and is itself informative for shaping debate. Large mammals are demographically vulnerabile to hunting pressure owing to their typically low reproduction rates and low population growth7,8. It has been estimated that low intensity hunting (such as the killing of just one juvenile per person per decade) could result in a species being extinguished over a few hundred years7. Such selective, low-level hunting would be virtually imperceptible in the archaeological record, accounting for the lack of reported kill sites. In this scenario, all species of megafauna could have been lost from the entire continent within a few thousand years. In the Cape Pasley record, megafaunal population collapse commenced within 2,000 years of the established date for human dispersal on Australia at ∼47 kyr ago (ref. 16), with extinction completed within 4,000 years. We conclude our results are consistent with extinction being driven by such ‘imperceptible overkill’7.
BTW, based on the abstract of the Australia case you cited, there is no issue in the study with humans being a prime factor with the collapse of the Mega fauna in Australia, the study is just bout the issue about humans arriving earlier than was thought before.
You glossed over what I said : The overkill hypothesis has been totally discredited. That doesnt mean human hunting didnt play a part, of course. (and in places like New Zealand, it was the critical point), but scientists are now leaning more towards climate change:
Overkill is dead, dead dead. Never any evidence for it anyway. So scientists are turning more toward climate change- while not ignoring the very real issue of humans.
But that only shows you did not read the last study I cited, it is not dead. It is just that it is more likely that both humans and climate were involved. It is like what killed the dinosaurs, the asteroid theory is not dead just because very increased volcanic activity was also found to take place back then, most scientists are concluding that not a single item was the reason, but a combination of 2 or more reasons.
It didnt mention Overkill except where it says "‘imperceptible overkill" which is just the opposite of Overkill: It has been estimated that low intensity hunting… Overkill is super high intensity hunting where entire ecosystems are wiped out in a generation or two. The article also sez "The debate over megafaunal extinction causes has consistently been between climate and humans".
And yes Australia is a interesting case. There is NO evidence of human hunting causing the extinction, as the article concurs. They simply conclude that in Australia there isnt evidence of the kind of climate changes as in North America and others, thereby it must have been humans. That’s not very good science, IMHO. Disease? Introduced species like the Dingo?
More study is need for Australia, clearly. I agree it’s problematic. Perhaps humans were the #1 cause there, but then they had tens of thousands of years, not a couple of generations.
Good science to report that climate change was not the all encompassing end. More research is needed. But clearly, that humans had a finger on the final results can not be reported to be dead, dead, dead as you insist. BTW, nowhere I do reject whole the climate change that took place then; again, it is just part of what one should take into account, like the dinosaur extinction, the explanations for it change a bit, but it does not deny 100% one idea over the other when they can be complementary in the end.
No, I never said that, in fact the opposite. The Overkill Hypothesis was the idea that there was a interesting coincidence in NA that man arrived and the megafauna was gone within a few generations. Thus humans must have killed and ate them. That has been disproven, it is gone gone gone. There was never any evidence for that (thus "hypothesis" not “theory” because you need evidence for scientific theory and Martins cheerfully admitted he had none at all), other than the coincidence and now the coincidence is gone. We now know humans arrived maybe ten thousand years before that. Certainly time for humans to have a significant impact. But not wiping out whole genera by hunting alone in a couple generations. That’s why the "overkill" is there.
Certainly hunting and other things human did- burning, bringing over competitive species, etc- had a effect. No one denies that.
Exactly why they disappeared depends on who you ask. Some experts point to dramatic climate shifts at the end of the Pleistocene that pared back the elephant’s favored habitat. Dissenting opinion convicts human depredation, invoking waves of voracious people who ate the world’s megafauna out of existence as Homo sapiens moved out of Africa and beyond. And while there is sometimes compromise between these views - climate change destabilizing ecosystems, for example, which may have made human activity more dramatic in its effects - the fact that we’re ramping up to a sixth mass extinction crisis has often been used as part of an ecological morality tale in which humanity has been a blight on the world’s biodiversity from the end of the Ice Age until today…his is important because, despite its seemingly widespread acceptance, the evidence for hungry hungry humans depleting large Pleistocene animals is not only contentious, but often lacking. “The reality is,” Nagaoka and coauthors write, “that the argument uses a series of untested assertions about human-environment interactions” and direct evidence of definitive hunting by Pleistocene humans is very rare despite a rich Ice Age fossil record.
Lots of words to claim that I refuse all that, I did not. BTW there was not a Martin or Martins in the study I cited.
Yeah, just from the naive layperson point of view I could definitely see how a smaller initial population of recently arrived humans wouldn’t seriously stress a megafauna population, but a significantly expanded human population a few thousand years later might well do so.
That was my first thought, too. But you know, there is more unused land in potential mammoth habitat than there is in potential elephant habitat. It is hard to create wildlife preserves there, and hard to police them against ivory hunters, too.
On the other hand, I have purchased some nice carved mammoth ivory. Unlike elephant ivory, it’s legal to sell it internationally. (With about 5 minutes of training, you can distinguish the two with the naked eye – a friend showed me the differences in a large display of ivory, and I could pick out which was which quite easily.) If mammoths are re-introduced, I suppose mammoth ivory will become off-limits, too. 