Can I have a cite on this, please? (Out of curiousity.) I’ve done some googling and can only find that there is evidence that dwarf mammoths survived on at least one unpopulated island as recently as ~1700 B.C.E.
I’m way out of my element here, so I’ll just provide the following hypothesis. Skepticism abounds…
“An early date of 33,000 years BP has been proposed for a cultural complex found at Monte Verde, Chile by Dillahay (1984, 1988) but it has not yet been generally accepted. Another, more substantial component at this site, dating from 14,000 to 12,000, has been widely accepted . Another site, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in westcentral Pennsylvania, has a component that has been dated at about 16,000 years BP. Further to the north, a small cultural component at Bluefish Caves in the Yukon, has been dated by Cinq-Mars at ca. 13,000 BP. Also in the time range of 13,000 BP are some broken bones from Trail Creek Caves on the Seward Peninsula that the excavator feels could only have been broken by humans (Larson 1968). All the other firmly dated sites that seem to be pertinent to early human settlement of this hemisphere postdate 12,000 BP.”
"Archaeologists say a site in South Carolina may rewrite the history of how the Americas were settled by pushing back the date of human settlement thousands of years. But their interpretation is already igniting controversy among scientists.
An archaeologist from the University of South Carolina on Wednesday announced radiocarbon tests that dated the first human settlement in North America to 50,000 years ago – at least 25,000 years before other known human sites on the continent.
“Topper is the oldest radiocarbon dated site in North America,” said Albert Goodyear of the University of South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology.
… CLIP …
Since the 1930s, archaeologists generally believed North America was settled by hunters following large game over the land bridge about 13,000 years ago.
“That had been repeated so many times in textbooks and lectures it became part of the common lore,” said Dennis Stanford, curator of archeology at the Smithsonian Institution. “People forgot it was only an unproven hypothesis.”
A growing body of evidence has prompted scientists to challenge that assumption.
A scattering of sites from South America to Oklahoma have found evidence of a human presence before 13,000 years ago – or the first Clovis sites – since the discovery of human artifacts in a cave near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1936.
These discoveries are leading archaeologists to support alternative theories – such as settlement by sea – for the Americas.
Second article found at
Kudos to Blake for a couple of first-rate posts.
Thanks everyone. Blake, I’m off to the library for that.
Man, Anthropology seems so interesting. Why’d I pick Biology again?
This was from a TV show about Kennewick Man several years ago. The local Native American tribe was trying to get the courts to award them custody of Kennewick Man so they could bury him. One of the scientists involved theorized that Amerinds might have wiped out a previously-settled population. The show interviewed some Native American guys who were, unsurprisingly, not too fond of this theory.
So yeah, it’s all speculative, but given the discoveries in South America it’s not as far-fetched as all that. I think that the TV show might have even mentioned some of the pre-Clovis discoveries, in support of the theory that other people were here before the Amerinds.
That would probably be Wrangel Island. The youngest dated remnant was 3700 years ago and the population is believed to have survived until 3000 years ago, which is into historical times. There is evidence for similar such survivals from St. Paul, although they only lasted until around 5000ybp. A Google search on [mammoth st. paul] or [mammoth wrangel] will produce limitless references. There are also other island groups that are giving up recent mammoth fossils. It now appears that any island the mammoths reached and were isolated on that was large enough to sustain them acted as a refuge long after the mainland populations vanished.
I appear to have been overstating it when I claimed they survived until classical roman times. My faulty memory. It has been speculated that they survived until that may have survived until that recently but solid evidence is lacking.
But the point is that mammoths did not all die off simultaneously at the end of the last ice age 10, 00 years ago as Tygerbryght claimed. Only the mainland mammoths subjected to human hunting died off then. Mammoths on islands isolated from humans survived far longer. This is exactly what we would expect if humans were responsible for their extinction. And it is exactly what we would not expect if climate change were responsible. Small, dwarfed, inbred island populations should have been more affected by climate change than diverse migratory full-sized continental herds.
Of course it doesn’t rule out disease as a factor, since island populations are also isolated from disease. However this still has all the problems inherent in invoking disease. And when discussing mammoths specifically we have the added problem of explaining why Eurasian mammoths succumbed to a disease they had evolved with. I can understand American mammoths succumbing to an introduced Eurasian disease, but it makes no sense that Eurasian mammoths would be susceptible.
Hey, I’m a biologist. This is biology. The real nitty-gritty of practical ecology. You can’t even understand what’s happening if you don’t know what the system is moving form or what it’s likely to be moving towards. And you can’t restore or preserve these systems if you don’t know what it was like ‘originally’.
Oh. OK. You pushed my “Gosh, that’s interesting!” button and I wanted to read up on it. (It was Wrangel that I found.)
Yeah, I guessed you were a biologist as soon as I read “clade” in your previous post. I’m just taking Evolutionary Mechanisms for the first time, and have just been exposed to that word. I forgot “grade” on the exam though.
Thanks for addressing that. Your entire post usually gets compacted down to a single sentence stating that “The megafauna of prehistoric North America was killed by human overhunting” when the mass extinctions happened within a few millenia after humans moved into an area. “human induced ecosystem change” is much more inclusive.