It seems sort of arbitrary to define Llama and Alpacas as a totally different sort of thing. They did survive, and wild guanaco still exist; they are doing well, even.
So that’s another data point.
Extinctions did occur in sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia, but were much fewer than in Australia, the Americas, Madagascar, and oceanic islands. The usual idea advanced for this is that African and Eurasian species had evolved together with hominid hunters like Homo erectus, and knew enough to be wary. In other areas, adept human hunters encountered an entirely naive fauna that had no fear of them, and were tame as in the Galapagos or other remote areas. Humans were simply able to slaughter them.
Right.
This is known as “shifting baselines.” Our concept of what is natural depends on what we are familiar with. For example, in 1900 many species of fish and wildlife were far more abundant than they were even in 1960. But since no one alive today remembers that, we think of the numbers in the 1960s as natural. We do need to recognize that we live in an impoverished environment, and take that into account in restoration programs.
Camels died out in the wild due to competition from the Marl Burro.
Go to your room!
The hunting hypothesis makes sense - the large mammals of Canada tend to become more plentiful as one goes north, where humans are more scarce and transportation (the scrubby forest) more difficult. So we have herds of caribou and moose, polar bears, etc.
Humans would hunt for two reasons - food and protection against predators or pests. The explanation for the large fauna of Africa is often given that they learned to be wary of humans since forever. However, anyone who’s been bitten by a tsetse fly will attest, they also have another guardian in some areas of Africa. (As do the moose of northern Canada and their friends, the mosquito and the blackfly)
There’s the suggestion the fauna outside of Africa did not recognize the first humans as dangerous. They don’t look like traditional four-legged threats. There’s a bit in Darwin’s journal where he mentions a Galapagos bird landing on a sailor’s arm and trying to drink from the jug as he pours a glass of water. A visitor to the islands a few decades later mentions a boy with a length of cane sitting near a waterhole, hitting birds who came to drink. In the intervening years, birds had gained the instinct to stay several feet away from humans. Many species on remote islands became extinct because they did not know - until too late - that humans were dangerous. You can read the same stories from early settlers in North America - some birds were so “stupid” you could walk up to them roosting at night and kill them. By now, cautionary instict has been bred in.
Also, the larger fauna tend to have longer breeding cycles as well as fewer numbers, since it takes a greater range to feed them; taking out a mastodon reduces the population substantially more by percentage than taking out a prairie dog, and it could be years before another is ready to move into that territory. Reduce the population too far, and it cannot breed fast enough to match depredations by hunters.
There’s always the other go-to explanation for extinctions, climate change. Camels, and many other species, are particularly adapted for a specific ecology. Change that, and they may not have a place to migrate to, so numbers dwindle. If you are adapted to hot desert, cold desert may not work; or better adapted animals may eat your lunch… Humans move into the choice of habitat and the numbers dwindle even more, as happened with the bison and carrier pigeon. (Respectively, one was trampling future fields, the other accused of eating the crops in those fields.)
Open terrain is perfect for hunting with modern firearms, but not so with 2000 year-old weaponry. It is very difficult to approach game animals, let alone those with large eyes hovering 7 feet off the ground, without substantial cover to within an effective bow or spear range.
The research on ancient camel hunting I’ve seen suggests these animals were ambushed at their halophyte feeding sites, where muddy terrain facilitated the advancement to shooting / spearing of the animals. Archaeological sites with over 100 individual wild camel remains attest to the level of hunting pressure exerted upon the camelid.
Sorry. Your post previous to mine was about Native Americans.
In Australia, what occasionally irritates me are suggestions that it’s OK to have “managed forests”, because the Europeans have managed forests, and they aren’t seeing any extinction events. You fools: it’s Because the Europeans already had their extinction events.
And yes, we had a separate extinction horizon at the time of first aboriginal settlement. That’s an entwined argument, equally political.
Yep…
A bunch of guys with spears and bows can kill a surprising number of animals over time.