True, but I read that the fossil record there is poor, and we don’t have solid evidence of what species went extinct when?
That’s true of any fossil record, anywhere, at any time. The nature of fossilisation guarantees that this is the case.
I read Australia was among the worst.
Ah, here’s a quote- wiki "Diprotodonts are restricted to Australasia. The earliest known fossils date to the late Oligocene. However it is certain that their genesis lies earlier than this, as there are large gaps in Australia’s fossil record and virtually no fossil record at all in geologically active New Guinea. The great diversity of known Oligocene diprotodonts suggests that the order began to diverge well beforehand."
Diprotodon does seem to be a exception, but nearly all the remains seem to have died in droughts."The majority of fossil finds are of demographic groups indicative of diprotodonts dying in drought conditions. For example, hundreds of individuals were found in Lake Callabonna with well preserved lower bodies but crushed and distorted heads.[4] It is theorised several family groups sank in mud while crossing the drying lakebed. Other finds consist of age groupings of young or old animals which are first to die during a drought."
I am not claiming here that humans had nothing to do with the extinctions, mind you. Just that the fossil records here are sparse.
Exactly what I was looking for, thanks! In particular, points 2 & 3 fit a pattern I hadn’t considered before: limitations on the efficiency of agriculture in pre-modern times. Cropland does wear out if you don’t have a sophisticated system of fertilizer and crop rotation. And the introduction of crops imported from the New World made a difference: the potato could be grown in even harsh climates, and new fodder crops made it possible to better keep animals through a long cold winter.
It may be what you are looking for but your OP premise is incorrect. In all areas other than island ecologies, megafauna existed along side man. In other words, your premise is the exception, not the rule.
Hmm, and come to think of it, in island areas where the megafauna was wiped out*, it was by hunter-gatherers, not agriculture.
So, your premise is just about entirely incorrect. GB may be the one exception, but they still had wild boar, wolf and deer.
- in areas like NA, sure the megafauna took a hit- many species went extinct- but there certainly was still plenty of large mammals living alongside the natives for millennium.
I was specifically addressing civilization- i.e., cultures sophisticated enough to practice plow farming and build cities- coexisting with megafauna. Of course island fauna not adapted to human presence (and N.A. could be considered an “island” in that regard) would take a hit. And many populations of animals survive in modern times only because of the relatively modern ethic of habitat conservation. I was remarking that until relatively recent times you could go 500 km (or less) from Mumbai or Vienna and find yourself in a wilderness nearly unchanged since the end of the Ice Ages.
The confusion is because “megafauna extinction” is a label that usually refers to the pre-civilization extinction of mammoths and other big ice-age mammals. You are asking about how the survivors of THOSE extinctions (bears, deer, wolves, etc.) managed to survive the destruction of their habitats when farmers arrived and began to cut down the forests and plow up the grasslands.
It’s a good question. Pre-industrial farmers were certainly capable of cutting down forests for farmland. With the thousands of years that farming existed in Europe, you would think that the population density of farmers would have risen to the point that they would have cleared every acre of forest. Somehow it didn’t happen.
That’s not true. As noted, it’s only happened three times: Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand. Both the Malagasy and the Maori were agriculturists. IOW 2/3 of the times where the megafauna was wiped out, it was by agriculture, not hunter-gatherers.
The same was true of New York, Rio, Bangkok or and Jakarta. So despite your perceptions, there is nothing special about India or Europe.
True, I’m not that familiar with AUstralia.
However, IIRC, the maority of the land is the red interior desert. The western strip is fertile but narrow coastal plains and then some failry rugged but low mountains. The area just over the mountains, and the southeast triangle IIRC is good grazing plains, some nice wineries, but tends toward dry too. The northern area is very tropical but only on a narrow strip along the coast.
The 3 sisters area or the railroad up from Cairns looked pretty rugged. Anything bigger than a mountain goat probably didn’t “roam in herds” there. Certainly nothing approaching the size of the American-Canadian prairies. If all of Australia was the range, it probably took a while for early invaders to do in a large animal. If they were confined to, say a smaller ecosystem by climate or barriers, they would be more easily decimated. Horned turtles probably had a limited range (I’m guessing seashore nesting made then sitting ducks?). Of course large animals need abundant food sources, which means they don’t do well in deserts. IIRC too the aborigines made use of fire to herd game to slaughter, which was not an easy tactic for even a large animal to avoid.
As for the forests of Europe, I heard once that stories like Hansel and Gretel and the general “creepiness” of the Black Forest was due to the black death, where estimates were 33% to 50% of the population died. Whole villages were abandoned and overgrown in the late 1400’s. Reading the turbulence of the times, it’s a wonder anyone survived from the Roman Empire to the Reformation.
OK, but the Moa was apparently wiped out by hunting wiki "The Māori arrived sometime before A.D. 1300, and all moa genera were soon driven to extinction by hunting and, to a lesser extent, forest clearance. By about A.D. 1400 all moa are generally thought to have become extinct, along with the Haast’s Eagle which had relied on them for food. Recent research using carbon-14 dating of middens strongly suggests that this took less than a hundred years[31]; rather than the period of exploitation lasting several hundred years which had been earlier believed."
And according to this wiki , the early Maori were likely more hunting than farming *“The Eastern Polynesian ancestors of the Māori arrived in a forested land with abundant birdlife, including several now extinct moa species weighing from 20 to 250 kg. Other species, also now extinct, included a swan, a goose and the giant Haast’s Eagle, which preyed upon the moa. Marine mammals, in particular seals, thronged the coasts, with coastal colonies much further north than today[update].[16] In the mid-19th century, people discovered large numbers of moa-bones alongside human tools, with some of the bones showing evidence of butchery and cooking. Early researchers, such as Julius von Haast, a geologist, incorrectly interpreted these remains as belonging to a prehistoric Paleolithic people; later researchers, notably Percy Smith, magnified such theories into an elaborate scenario with a series of sharply-defined cultural stages which had Māori arriving in a Great Fleet in 1350 AD and replacing the so-called “moa-hunter” culture with a “classical Māori” culture based on horticulture.[17] Current[update] anthropological theories recognise no evidence for a pre-Māori people; the archaeological record indicates a gradual evolution in culture that varied in pace and extent according to local resources and conditions.[18]”
However, I agree with you 100%, much megafauna survived and lived just fine alongside mankind in most of the areas of the world- nothing all that special about India or Europe.
Which is of course a relatively uniform and stable environment. So that alone contradicts your claim that the available environments were small. The majority of a continent is not small by any standard.
In contrast you can not say that the majority of North America is anything. The continent comprises many small ecosystem types.
The western strip is notoriously infertile. There is some marginal agricutural land in the extreme south west, but not a lot, and based on sandy, relatively infertile soils.
The largest areas of fertile soils are the vertisol plains in the east, extending form roughly 100-800km inland.
That’s not really accurate. But I fail to see what the relevance is anyway.
Well, no. Oddly enough all of the tropics are tropical.
An area of less than 100km square, out of an entire continent.
That would be because it is naturally rainforest. Not normally amendable to herd animals.
Huh? The central plains of Australia absolutely dwarf the American prairies. You just said yourself, they comprise the majority of the continent.
What’s that based on?
What seashore nesting? These animals roamed the seasonal rainforest, the dry savannas and central deserts. I don’t think beaches would ever have been commonly encountered.
Yes, because we all know that you will never find camels, elephant, rhinoceros, kangaroos or antelope in deserts.
In actual fact large animals are most common in arid and semi-arid environments.
But the point you probably need to understand is that when humans arrived, Australia was mostly covered by vine thicket. That vegetation type was mostly eliminated though repeated burnings, and the animals that depended on it vanished as well. The savannas and grasslands of modern Australia are not in any way natural.
Indeed. After the great plague, many previously populated areas returned to a wild state, in particular.
I don’t know about your other WAGs, but an important factor sas also that forested area were also deliberately maintained unfarmed for a variety of purposes, like hunting, obviously to provide wood for common use, and beginning maybe at the 17th century in order to provide high quality wood for the navy. Some drained marshes, unfit for farming were planted with trees. During the 20th century, forests gained ground as the less fertile lands were abandoned by farmers, along with lands that were used to provide mediocre grazing for some sheep or goats.
If you’re in a forest in western europe, it doesn’t mean that it has been there from time immemorial. Maybe the land was farmed 60 years ago, or 600 years ago. Actually, I believe that there are quite ancient periods during which forested areas had become quite rare, and I believe too that forests cover a much larger surface in europe now than they did during, say, the 13th century.
So, you mention “surviving forests”, but I don’t think that, for the most part they actually survived. They can have disappeared, reappeared naturally, disappeared again, being replanted with trees, etc…
While agriculture in Europe is thousands of years old, I don’t think most of land has been economical to cultivate more than a 1000 years. At that time the evolution of ploughs and horse collars etc. made it possible to work the tough north European soil and created the modern geography where England, northern France, Germany, Poland, Russia are great farming areas. Before, the balance of population was very much in the south (e.g. Mediterranean France) and people in the north cultivated strictly the land that was easiest to work.
Furthermore, there are a lot of mountain or hill ranges, that maintain forest areas and are not feasible to cultivate even today. I would think Schwarzwald is an example of that more than pre-black death thriving farming community? And even the Alps have forests. In terms of big animals, at least bears and wolves can survive in those as long as the shepherds don’t shoot them to extinction. The farther you go to north the more modest hills become too cold to farm. The popultaion growth that has forced to take most of land to farming has taken centuries.
Even in the restricted area and very densely human populated Japanese islands megafauna survive to the extent that there was a recent (2009-09-20) bear attack on people at a highway rest stop in the central mountains.
It’s safe to say that all species mentioned would be extinct and most of our forests clear cut by now without govt imposed conservation.
In passing, the situation in Australia was quite different from that in the Americas. There, a continent without predators was invaded by effective hunters of whom the animals had no fear. Here, the indigenous folk and fauna evolved together and man was recognized and avoided as the predator he is.
Given that all those species still exist in Europe, I think it’s safe to say they wouldn’t.
Are you seriously suggesting that Australia had no predators prior to the arrival of humans? If so you could not be more wrong. Australia was, and still is, teeming with predators.
In which sense it is absolutely no different from the Americas.
Unless you live in Africa that obviously isn’t true.
No govt regulation in Europe?
No. Well, I did but misspoke.
I’m saying that the arrival of man with weapons thrust a deadly universal predator upon an ecosystem which had no time to adapt to (learn to fear) it before being wiped out.
Demonstrably untrue. It was only when Whitey arrived with guns, horses and a commercial interest in meat, hides and real estate and a hankering for trophies along with a policy of destroying native subsistence, that many species faced extinction. Fortunately, it took 500 years to really overpopulate this country and in that time we learned a few things although the battle between developers and preservationists continues to this day.
However, there were also native cultures prior to Europeans who were quite capable of doing substantial damage to the environment. Portions of the American southwest, for example.
In particular?