But in all seriousness, I’d be delighted to see the reintroduction of mammoths.
I’m just talking about preserving current elephants on the land they’re already on.
In case it isn’t clear from my previous posts, I think it’s an incredibly misguided effort that wastes resources and won’t pay off the way they’re suggesting it will.
Also, I didn’t grow up with Mr Snuffleapagus, so I have zero sentimental attachment to mammoths the way I do to, say, actual elephants.
Or to whales, who can have a huge climate impact too and don’t require zombie science. Just will.
I doubt it would have any impact on climate, and I don’t see how creating mammoths would pay for itself. Maybe via tourism. But I’m a capitalist, and think that within wide parameters, people should be able to use their resources as they choose. So I’m not worried about anyone “wasting resources” on trying to make mammoths.
As for preserving elephants – my guess is that if something mammoth-like is born, it will give a lot of publicity to the plight of elephants, and might help preserve their habitat.
That should not spare them from ridicule for stupid choices.
How does that work? Most people are already aware (or should be) of the plight of elephants. How is producing a pseudo-mammoth going to increase that?
If the goal is to produce a cool science experiment related to elephants, I would think you’d get more bang for buck bringing back the Mediterranean dwarf island elephants.
Ah, but we don’t have a lot of frozen specimens of those lying around, with nearly intact DNA.
But I suspect a miniphaunt would have a lot of commercial value, much more than a mammoth. So there’s that.
We don’t need it, we just* need to isolate the genes for dwarfism in existing elephants like the Bornean pygmy elephant, and work with that.
- I’m aware it’s a big “just”.
You always bring the “Overkill Hypothesis” into this, as if the fact that it has been discredited also brings into question the fact that many megafaunal extinctions were caused by the arrival of humans (not just hunting, but perhaps burning of habitat or other environmental changes).
I would not say that scientists in general are “leaning more toward climate change.” Some scientists continue to push climate change, at least in certain areas. But the fact that megafaunal extinctions mostly follow the arrival of modern humans in an area rather than being correlated with climate change is generally recognized. The extinctions may not immediately follow the arrival of humans, but take place some time later. That doesn’t mean that humans weren’t involved.
Mammoths survived on on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until 4,000 years ago, more than 10,000 years after they became extinct on the mainland. The fact that humans reached Wrangel late almost certainly had something to do with their continued survival there.
Not to mention Australia, where @DrDeth brings up Dingoes as an introduced species that may have had an impact, ignoring the fact that it was humans who brought them to Australia in the first place, as well as the fact that humans are also an invasive predatory species…
Dingos certainly had nothing to do with megafaunal extinctions in Australia. People have the impression they came at the same time as the Aborigines, but they actually arrived only about 3,500 years ago with seafarers from Indonesia, about 40,000 years after the extinction of the megafauna. They probably caused the extinction of the Thylacine and Tasmainian Devil on the Australian mainland, however.
I am referencing this post, bolding mine:
It certainly isn’t MY assertion that dingoes contributed to the extinction of the Diprotodon or anything like that (though they certainly likely contributed to the more recent displacement and extinction of the marsupial carnivores as you said).
Not only did I not ignore that, I pointed it out. Humans also bring in rats too. And sometimes disease. Humans generally have a much greater effect on the environment thru introduced species, fires, and other stuff other than simple hunting.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/arrival-of-the-dingo#:~:text=Introduced%20species,-The%20dingo%20is&text=The%201969%20discovery%20of%20archaeological,at%20least%203500%20years%20ago.
The dingo is Australia’s first introduced species, but until recently its history has been uncertain. The fact that there are no dingo fossils in Tasmania indicates that dingoes must have arrived after rising waters separated the island from the Australian mainland about 12,000 years ago.
The 1969 discovery of archaeological evidence in caves on the Nullarbor Plain near Madura, Western Australia, has led to general agreement that the dingo was on the Australian mainland at least 3500 years ago.1
Since the mid-2000s, technological advances have supported new research into the origin of dingoes. A 2011 study utilising DNA testing and sequencing shows that the Australian dingo is closely related to East Asian domestic dogs, and arrived via South-East Asia between 5000 and 10,000 years ago.2
Thus indeed, the Dingo was a bad example in this case. mea culpa Rats got there even later. Diseases of course came with the umans.
Do you have a cite for humans bringing illnesses that transferred to Australia’s megafauna in an era where humans did not bring livestock with them?
(I did see one study that argued that humans may have brought Anthrax through pelts to the animals of North America, but nothing similar about Australia. And I’ll note that this still puts the blame for the extinction at the hands of humans, it just changes the means by which this was accomplished, so it doesn’t have much to do with this thread and arguing against humans being the primary drivers of megafaunal extinction)
Nope, but others have said it could have been disease. But that article simple concluded they they didnt think it was climate changes, thus it had to be humans.
However:
Whodunnit? The evidence points to environmental change
Why did these megafauna become extinct? It has been argued that the extinctions were due to over-hunting by humans, and occurred shortly after people arrived in Australia.
However, this theory is not supported by our finding that a diverse collection of these ancient giants still survived 40,000 years ago, after humans had spread around the continent.
Theories of the Extinction of the Australian Megafauna
The extinction of the Australian megafauna has been discussed and argued over for 150 years with no consensus being reached. according to Johnson (2006) the difference of opinion among the researchers in the field have become deeper. In his book, Australia’s Mammal Extinctions, he considers a wide range of theories… Johnson discusses a number of other suggested causes of the extinction.
** Drought*
** Changing the environment with fire*
** Overkill*
** Flannery eaters*
** Megafaunal naivety*
** Lack of archaeological evidence*
** Predator-prey theory*
** Hyperdisease*
This single fossil has changed the nature of the megafauna extinction debate. We can now abandon the rapid/over kill hypothesis and start to untangle how climate may have played a role, or how changes in Aboriginal population numbers may have impacted on the ecology of the megafauna?
We should start to build an understanding of how these animals played a role in the ecology of ancient Australia. Were they, for example, critical in the management of certain habitats, just as the megafauna of Africa are today?
We know next to nothing of the ecology of most of these species.
It is possible that some species of megafauna co-existed for even longer so much work remains to be done. There is still a great deal to learn about Australia’s ancient megafauna.
So we got babales article, saying it wasnt climate change, so it must have been Humans.
Then another saying it wasnt humans it was climate change.
Then another saying No consensus but it could have been any of eight things.
Then another saying Not the rapid/over kill hypothesis but we need more study.
I now conclude it was aliens. 
I didn’t link an article in this thread, though 0lenty of other people did 
One major argument against climate change as a general explanation is that the megafauna on each continent had already experienced a series of drastic climate changes between glacial and interglacial periods through most of the Pleistocene without suffering much loss. So why should they die out during the most recent ones, and at different times on each continent. The one common factor is the fact that they all took place after the arrival of modern humans, even if the humans had arrived thousands of years before. So it may be that climate change + humans = extinction, when climate change by itself isn’t sufficient.
Also arguing against climate is the fact that extinctions were based almost entirely on size, not on habitat or ecology. The largest animals became extinct, even when closely related smaller ones survived fine. Many groups occurred in a wide range of habitats. In the Americas, proboscidians were diverse in habitat. Wooly Mammoths lived in the “mammoth steppe” grasslands; Columbian Mammoths lived in open habitats farther south; and American Mastodons lived in spruce forests. In South America, other kinds of mastodons lived in habitats from tropical forest to grasslands to mountains. Like elephants, some species were generalist feeders eating almost any kind of vegetation.
It’s hard to imagine a single kind of climate change causing the extinction of all of these species throughout the Americas at more-or-less the same time, from Arctic areas to the tropics. A climate change that is detrimental to one species is likely to be beneficial to other species. Some habitats diminished while others increased, and the habitats these animals occurred in still exist today.
The argument can be made about other groups as well. Why should ground sloths (of which there were many kinds), glyptodonts, camels, horses, toxodonts, and others all have become extinct when they occurred in a variety of habitats and had different ecologies.
I think this summarizes the state of the debate. Whenever new research comes out, the researchers tend to state that their answer is the only correct one. But different factors may have been important in different areas. Sometimes it was a combination of factors.
This recent book by Ross MacPhee gives a good summary of the state of the controversy.
https://www.amazon.com/End-Megafauna-Fiercest-Strangest-Animals/dp/0393249298
Sorry.
Absolutely. Once we dump the discredited Overkill Hypothesis, we can work on the true causes- which may indeed be a combination of several things- or different things in different areas (New Zealand for example does look like human hunting as the main cause).
By no means do I discount humans as a major factor. Humans have proved they can be a major environmental disaster. What humans are doing in the rainforest is making extinct thousands of species constantly. It usually isnt hunting, but damn us humans are ingenious in the ways we can screw the environment. Introduced Species, fires, clear cutting, pollution, chemicals, all sorts of stuff.
I am confident in stating it wasnt Jewish Space lasers, however. I think we have agreement there.
That looks like a great book- thanks.