Glad to hear it. At the time the TV show was filmed, the tribe had won the early court battles.
In fact your site does show that the “man is responsible for the Pleistocene Mammal extinctions” theory. is incorrect. “Contributed to” and “the primary or sole cause of” are way different.
"In the forensic quest for who done it, many have pointed fingers squarely at humans.
But in a review appearing in the Oct. 1 issue of Science, Barnosky and his colleagues conclude that climate change also played a big role in driving these extinctions."
and “There’s been a lot of talk about people causing the extinction of the megafauna by killing everything they saw, like a blitzkrieg,” said Barnosky, professor of integrative biology and a curator in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. “But if you look at all the evidence, it’s clear that while humans had a major role in these extinctions, in many cases climate change was a key part of the recipe.”
As the article says- many blamed the extinctions only or primarily on human hunting. The article disputes this- saying that in many cases climate changes are more important, and in some cases it was man- but indirectly, by long-term habitat alteration.
The point being- many thought that human hunting was the sole cause of such extentcions- and your cite strongly disputes this.
Nonsense. You are just setting up a straw man. Few scientists have ever contended that humans were the sole cause of Pleistocene extinctions. And many other scientists have argued that climate change was the primary or sole cause of the extinctions. The article strongly contradicts the latter position as well.
The fact of the matter is, the evidence strongly suggests that without the impact of human hunting, much of the megafauna would not have become extinct even in the face of climate change. Most of the species had survived several equally severe climate changes through most of the Pleistocene. It was humans that tipped the balance the last time.
Your cite says otherwise: “In the forensic quest for who done it, many have pointed fingers squarely at humans.”
“There’s been a lot of talk about people causing the extinction of the megafauna by killing everything they saw, like a blitzkrieg,…”
“Those blaming humans ascribe the extinctions to human hunting, either through overkill - hunting that could have led to extinction in about 1,500 years - or through a “blitzkrieg” of hunting that could have knocked off a species in less than 500 years.”
“Barnosky and his colleagues found sparse evidence outside Australia that humans were the sole cause of extinction.”
In fact, according to *your *cite, it was primarily in NA (and not in Alaska) where “North America, in particular, is an example of a place where humans speeded the process of climate-caused extinction, in many cases by overkill.”
I know of few that doubt that human hunting had an impact. Fact is- we’ll never know exactly how much of an impact. The “humans killed them all off by hunting” camp had one “big arrow in their quiver of arguments”- that the extinctions and the arrival of humans more or less co-incided. That was their strongest argument, and now it’s gone.
Try reading the general literature, and not a single cite (and a non-technical one, at that). In the primary literature, there are few scientists who attribute megafaunal extinctions solely to humans. Most accept a role for climate change.
But widespread evidence that they contributed.
Barnowsky indicates it was significant in several regions.
Once again, nonsense. You persist in trying to oversimplify a complex situation. The argument, of course, is not “gone.” It still applies for some regions. The extinction event in North America may not have coincided with the arrival of humans, but as I said it did coincide with the rapid spread of the big-game hunting Clovis culture.
It was *your cite, not mine- I can only assume you chose it because you generally agreed with it and admired it. And you called my statement a 'strawman", which if so, was a strawman used no less than 4 times by the very cite you provided.
Simply put- there is no proof that humans (by hunting) caused* any* extinctions of any successful species during the Pleistocene. Those who said that humans did “cause the extinction of the megafauna by killing everything they saw, like a blitzkrieg” had only one argument in their belt, and that’s gone. Sure- Clovis man was a successful hunter. But he didn’t kill off the “Irish elk… the straight-tusked elephants… grizzly-like Arctodus simus, mammoths and others” (“This is a very clear case of climate-caused extinction without the significant input of humans,” Barnosky said."), and he didn’t kill off the Bison, either. In fact- before the white man, there were uncounted millions of them. Much easier to kill than the mastodons or the saber-toothed cat- why wasn’t even a dent put in the population of the Bison?
No doubt that hunting played a part. That human changes to the evironment played a part. But also that climatological changes played a part too. AND, there may have been other significant factors that we don’t know about- disease, maybe. Pointing a finger at any* one *cause is “oversimplification” and “nonsense”.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
*
It was *your cite, not mine- I can only assume you chose it because you generally agreed with it and admired it. And you called my statement a 'strawman", which if so, was a strawman used no less than 4 times by the very cite you provided.
[quote]
That’s an interesting contention - that because someone cites an article, they necessarily agree 100% with every single statement in it. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s a press release, not a scientific article, and hence it states things in a highly simplified way for the general public. I’d link to the Barnosky article itself, but I don’t think it’s available for free. I do agree with Barnosky’s basic point, that both human activity and climate played a role in the megafaunal extinctions, and that’s why I linked to it.
And even so, the article doesn’t say anywhere what you said:
Emphasis mine. Nowhere in the article does it say those who blame humans think they were the sole cause. If you read the original articles by the scientists they are referring to, you’ll find few that would take that position.
I agree with this. Who are you arguing with?
Coding fixed for clarity:
That’s an interesting contention - that because someone cites an article, they necessarily agree 100% with every single statement in it. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s a press release, not a scientific article, and hence it states things in a highly simplified way for the general public. I’d link to the Barnosky article itself, but I don’t think it’s available for free. I do agree with Barnosky’s basic point, that both human activity and climate played a role in the megafaunal extinctions, and that’s why I linked to it.
And even so, the article doesn’t say anywhere what you said:
Emphasis mine. Nowhere in the article does it say those who blame humans think they were the sole cause. If you read the original articles by the scientists they are referring to, you’ll find few that would take that position.
I agree with this. Who are you arguing with?
This sort of thing is fascinating. While I was a senior in high school, I got to my anthropology class one morning when the teacher said instead of our usual classwork that day we were going to go over to a place on campus where a Native American grave had been accidentally unearthed. We went over to look, and there was the skeleton of a small adult, with two small soapstone bowls. Radiocarbon dating eventually showed it to be from 8000BP, and the bowls were similar to those of a Channel Islands culture of that time. I have mixed feelings about this. This person’s loved ones buried their deceased relative with ceremony and care, obviously expecting that he would remain there in peace. On the other hand, to be present when something like this comes to light, seems to connect us with those people of long ago in a unique way.
There must be any number of similar graves in the neighborhood. There are springs on the grounds of the school which always flow abundantly, no matter how dry the Southern California weather gets. Father Serra is supposed to have camped there while travelling from San Gabriel to San Fernando. No doubt, it was a meeting place for the aboriginal population for thousands of years.
Yeah, it’s a lot more difficult.
The point to remember here is that the longest water journey made by people colonising Australia was probably only a bit over 40kms. At the time humans arrived sea levels were such that island hopping was quite easy. Moreover because of the patterns of ocean currents and winds and the migration patterns of birds even that one ‘huge’ half day, over-the-horizon sea journey wasn’t a leap into the unknown. Those people would have or at least should have been fully aware that there was land there. In reality they probably had a fairly good idea of where the land was and how big it was. Moreover the journey was reasonably safe and routine. Water and air temperatures were mild and in winter the storms were rare.
Added to that with the exception of boats these people were able to use the same basic level of technology as they had when they left Africa. Tropical subsistence is fairly standard. That’s probably a large part of the reason why both H. erectus and later H. sapiens colonised SE Asia so rapidly and completely while Europe and central Asia took much longer to be even partially settled.
That’s very different any hypothetical journey along the east coast of Asia through Siberia and down Alaska. At the best of times the temperatures were unpleasant and the weather unpredictable with fogs, storms etc. Moreover I don’t know of any evidence that migration patterns or ocean currents (even in periods when the oceans weren’t frozen) would have provided evidence of land across the horizon. It was a leap into the unknown. And the lifestyle was radically different to the African savanna style and presumably required a radically different toolkit. No longer could the colonists simply live as tropical hunters. Now they needed to rely exclusively on fishing and hunting seals etc along with changes in shelter and behaviour that a frigid climate dictates. Basically to make the leap across the straits by sea would have required the first people to become fully fledged Eskimos. That’s quite a cultural and technological leap from the African lifestyle they left behind just a few tens of millennia earlier.
Note that none of this means that they couldn’t have done it. It just means that it was much more difficult than the short island hops from tropical Asia to tropical Australia.
(popping in without having read the entire thread) A book that is very relevant to this discussion.
It would be very hard to argue that climate change killed the mammoths, I think. Mammoths were very adaptable animals, their remains having been found as far south as Florida on the east coast, and even as far south as Guatemala. What sort of climate change could have wiped out an animal which could so obviously handle widely varied environments?
I have been out of commission for a few days due to sciatica (rough!)
I appreciate the links, especially the extensive one on Kennewick man. As far as the extinction theories go, I saw something interesting on the Science Channel, and I wish I could remember where the archeology sites were–either pretty close to Canadian border or in Canada–At any rate, there seems to be some evidence that Man somehow ran the big boys off the edges of cliffs in big numbers, which they postulated due to finding bone beds at the base of cliffs where there were mammals of all ages and some spear points.
However, according to the people on the TV show, it could have also been evidence of something catastrophic (act of God) that killed a bunch of dinos in the same area, because they were herd animals. Then again, they had never seen fossils of meateaters all together, and they were presumed to be solitary in nature.
I wish I had the exact references, because I know this info is vague, and my memory isn’t perfect (could be due to the mega Percocet I had to take for the sciatica in order not to jump off a cliff myself and end the misery.)
That would be the descriptively-named Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta.
I believe there are other similar sites where this hunting technique was used.
It is a possibility to consider that man existed in America for some time fishing, gathering and trapping small game before making the technological leap (of which the Clovis point may be a part) which enabled them to become big game hunters (and subsequently drive several large species to extinction).
I’m more inclined to believe that it was a numbers thing. Man may have been here before Clovis, but in numbers too small to do significant damage to game populations. There may have been a population explosion around the time of the Clovis point, or perhaps a new wave of immigrants who brought technology with them and who overwhelmed the earlier (and more primitive?) inhabitants.
I thought you were just funning me, but what a surprise I got. Great site!
[off-topic but hopefully helpful: I had a bad case a few years ago. Several trips to a chiropracter later, I was cured.]
That’s pretty improbable and unsupported by any evidence. The biggest problem is that humans already had the toolkit needed to be effective big game hunters by 80, 000 years ago, well before any possible ventures into the Americas and possibly before any humans had left Africa.
Now there is a possibility that the earliest people in the Americas suffered the same fate as the Tasmanians in that they suffered a serious population decline and as a result lost almost all technology from the ability to make fire to the knowledge of clothing and hafted weapons. Note however that this is merely possible. There’s no evidence for it and moreover the massive size of the Americas makes it unlikely that the technology wouldn’t be rapidly reinvented as the population recovered and grew into the hundreds of thousands or millions.
I guess that’s related to your idea about human populations remaining low, however I can’t see any particular reason why anatomically and mentally modern humans would remain in low densities and technologically deficient on a land mass as massive as the Americas. Sure it’s not as large as Europe/Asia/Africa but it still should be more than large enough to support critical human growth.
And yet, if the archaeology is correct, there were people here before Clovis, but apparently not in large enough numbers to be archaeologically ubiquitous. So if that’s the case, we have to figure out why their numbers (apparently) remained low until Clovis.
My post was only speculation, so of course it’s not supported by evidence. I’m open to other ideas.
As to why numbers may have remained low, well, North America was a predator-rich environment. If the earliest inhabitants were technologically deficient (speculation, of course), those predators, combined with more limited food options, may have been enough to keep numbers down.