Just a note… “poisonous” and “venomous” are not “synonymous.”
Great post towards the beginning of the thread, are you an Archeologist by trade?
A quibble with a small part of a later post:
Your premise sounds correct but I think your numbers seem a little off.
For Europe: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18825303.700.html
**Are you talking strickly Homo Sapiens Sapiens? ** Even there the Americas have now been pushed back to 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. wiki
Jim
To paraphrase Jared Diamond, no matter what date you suggest for human migrations you will always find someone who contends it. I was referring to Homo sapiens. It becomes far too blurry when we start calling antecessor/heidelbergensis/nenderthalensis/erectus ‘humans’, especially in the context that ludovic was suggesting.
I generally disregard anything from Wikipedia that varies so wildly from consensus opinion. A figure for human arrival in the Americas of 30, 000 ybp is highly speculative and based on fragmentary evidence and certainly shouldn’t be stated as fact. My opinion of the Wikipedia article isn’t improved by the implication that humans moved into Australia directly from the near east 40, 000 years ago, and only moved into east Asia 20, 000 years later. I have never before heard anybody suggest that the migration to Australia from the Near East occured directly across the Indian Ocean as opposed to moving through South East Asia. The author either can’t communicate simple concepts, has no knowledge of geography or no knowledge of archaeology. Either way I’m not crediting anything he writes.
I have seen several articles lately that are arguing for 20,000 years ago. That was why I supplied the lower number I wrote. I am still waiting to activate my digital subscription to Scientific America, so I doubt I can find a reliable cite.
They have found some evidence of Pre-Clovis cultures.
You might be interested in this article The Peopling of the American Continents
It is the best I can find in a fairly quick search. It confirms the 12,000 figure and mass extinction of the American Mega-Fauna but also goes into a little detail on the Pre-Clovis entry into the Americas.
Jim
As others have pointed out, bears (in the lower 48) generally don’t pose too much of a problem. I’ve never seen one in the wild and I’ve lived all over this country.
Mountain lions however… :eek:
It’s at the very least extremely arguable that was was being referenced was “animals that will kill humans by biting them.” It’s the clear point, it seems to me, so your nitpicking on the point that “eat” means “ingest” is bordering on pedantry. You didn’t make the point that you agreed hippos were dangerous biters, you just latched on to the word “eat”, leaving a clear line to people thinking that you believe hippos are nice because they’re herbivores. It never occured to me from what you wrote that you were agreed that hippos were dangerous.
To add to Blake’s excellent answer: Snakes are a relatively new arrival to Austrailia, and most austrailian snake species are descended from various water snakes. This is important to realize, because it means that the snakes that colonized Austrailia already were pre-selected for venom, because most of the water snake species are venomous. So, one part of the answer to the OP’s question is that some of the groups of animals in Austrailia started out more deadly.
No, it isn’t bloody arguable at all. Ludoviv was specifcally talking about predators. For the love’ a Mike read the fricken’ thread before commenting and you might not drop these massive clangers.
Oh I see.
Ludovic and I were having a discussion specifically concerning “why we have so few natural predators” and that “it’s not that we’re so new, or clean, or imposing looking” and then refers to “animals that naturally ate us”.
But the clear point is that he is in fact referring to animals that will kill humans by biting them. Animals like snakes and spiders that, as Cardinal will now tell us, are known for not killing dirty or imposing looking creatures.
How pednatic of me to assume that when he said predators, referred to animals that eat us and then mentioned large animals like alligators and hipos as examples that he was referring to predtors that eat humans. :rolleyes:
If even one other person in this thread had reached such a conclusion you might even have a point to clarify. But since only you believe that, and since only you believe that when specifically discussing predators eats = bites I think your opinion is flawed and well worth ignoring.
It also apparently never occurred to you that a predator by defintion eats what it preys upon. Nor did it occur to you that being imposing can have no effect whatsoever on spiders or snakes and so they can not have been what Ludovic meant when he referred to “predators” and “animals that naturally ate us”
It seems that a lot of things pertaining to ecology and zoology haven’t ooccured to you.
They most certainly are not.
As far as we can tell from the fossil record, which is poor, snakes evolved about 130 million years ago. They were certainly present in South America and Australia by 100 million years ago, well before the continents even existed as separate entities. Snakes have very likely been present in Australia, if not from the moment of conception then from the very earliest times.
Reference please? How can Australian elapids or pythons be any more descended from water snakes than elapids or pythons elsewhere in the world?
No they aren’t. Most water snake species including the pythons, file snakes and genera such as Nerodia within the US are totally non-venomous.
That may or may not be true of some groups but it is not true of the snakes. In fact the last remnants of the most primitive groups of snakes survived far longer in Australia than anywhere else on the planet and were non-venomous.
Nitpickery - Australia only has one ‘i’. The spiders took the other one.
Sorry, but I stand by my point (somewhat), if not by my tone. We as smart creatures would have a tendency to kill off the things that often would kill us. I doubt we would make the distinction between “She’s dead, Jim” and “She’s been eaten, Jim.” Either way, we’d try to kill off the animals. If you want to make the point that hippos are easy to avoid if you know about them, like grizzlies, then I think I get it. But apparently they’re not, if we’re still being killed by them today in largish numbers. I understand you might come from a bio background, and I too have made the argument “Words mean things, use the one you mean!”, but it really seems to me that the point is that we have few things left that aren’t trying to avoid us, that will stand up to us and kill us.
WTF is that assumption based on? Do you have any evidence at all that people are more likely to kill off dangerous hippos than innocuous zebras? More likely to kill off dangerous grizzlies than innocuous bison? More likely to kill off dangerous taipans than innocuous pigeons?
In short, can you provide even a shred of evidence to support your contention that people have a tendency to kill off things that would kill us?
Yes, and as I pointed out above it is absolute bollocks when you try to use it to explain why there are so many dangerous animals in Australia.
If what you say is true and dangerous animal species are reduced by prolonged and preferential human hunting then we would expect to see the fewest dangerous animals in Africa, Australia and Asia where humans have lived the longest, and the most dangerous animals in the Americas and Europe where people have lived for the shortest time.
It’s pure bunkum. Not only do you have no evidence that people have a tendency to kill off things that would kill but the observations show exactly the opposite of what your theory predicted.
Oh, I’m not having the hubris to step into the bio debate. I use bio in my chem class as an example of “Things I Don’t Really Know or Have a Great Interest In”. My point is that the other poster’s point doesn’t seem to be distinguishable between “eats humans” and “kills humans by mauling”. If you know about the interplay between humans and the big animals and so on, more power to you. But I think that people would not have drawn a line of “Well, it kills us, but doesn’t eat us.”
And as I pointed out above I know it is absolute bollocks when you try to use it to explain why there are so many dangerous animals in Australia.
I have no idea why Australia has all the scary, killing beasties it does but I would like to point out that this is one cross-Tassie competition New Zealand will never win, YAY.
Is NZ the country with the safest wildlife? Other then the native Katipo spider and a couple of dodgy Aussie non-lethal spider implants (and the sea snakes someone mentioned…though we never see them) and perhaps the odd great white shark, pretty much everything here is user friendly.
Is there anywhere else as safe as NZ, when it comes to creatures?
Aussies win everything maybe being bitten, stung etc is natures payback. 
Are there? I know there’s lots of venomous ones, but are there many dangerous animals in Australia? We lose people to snakebite and crocs very very occasionally but is this statements supportable?
Any poisonous snake found by people near human habitation in Australia tends to find itself in a fatal argument with the nearest heavy instrument. Same with redbacks and funnelwebs. Same with crocs until the 50’s. Beaches in Australia have nets and baitlines to kill sharks.
I’ve certainly heard of people forming posses in India and Africa to go after lions or tigers that might have developed a taste for people.
Hunting bears and wolves and so on in Europe and North American was no doubt for sport but I don’t think that the fact that the choice of prey was also dangerous was entirely co-incidental.
Of course, your attempt to make the argument relative (“more likely to kill off dangerous taipans than innocuous pigeons”) is twaddle since the argument is about whether people killl of dangerous animals, not whether they are more likely to do that than kill non-dangerous animals.
Am I being pedantic? Possibly. Do I agree with the broad thrust of your position in this thread? Yes. Do I think you need a dose of your own cantankerous pedantic attitude? Undoubtedly.
Tourists.
Well, yeah.
dan·ger·ous
adj.
Being able or likely to do harm.
Unless you wish to argue against the world’s most venomous snakes, spiders, jellyfish, fish and spiders being able to do harm I think we can consider the issue resolved.
Fer chrissakes, as if the fact that 30 species of snakes are known to be deadly the loony bastards are busily spending million of dollars proving that they have have a dozen species of posionous lizards as well.
That’s Australians for you. Being home to more poisonous snakes than anywhere else in the world isn’t good enough. Oh no, they’ll get teams of anaotmists and molecular biologists proving that they are also home to more species of posionous lizard than the rest of the world combined.
Why do you actually want to know this? The country already has lots of poisonous bitey things. You won, OK? Do you really need to go out and prove that even the ones you assumed were harmless are poisonous? Is there some ultimate goal of proving that every single organism on the continent is venomous?
If you read the thread you will note that we are not discussing what happens in 21s century Australia but what happened in Australia, and indeed the world, over the past 60, 000 years. Unless you are suggesting you have evidence that such behaviour has been common for those 60, 000 years?
Is that what you are claiming, or is this a total non sequitur?
Sigh.No.
When discussing these sorts of ecological questions the questions are the same. You can not legitimately claim preferential predation/extermination as ludovic did unless you actually have evidence of preferential predation. You can not claim that humans will tend to kill of those species that prey on them unless you can show evidence that the rate of extinction is higher than for innocuous or even irrelevant species.
If dangerous animals are not exterminated at a rate greater than the average rate for all species then exactly what evidence do you have that humans will tend to kill species that prey on us Princhester? How do you know that is the case? How could you separate such supposed preferential extermination from incidental or nutritional exterminations if the rate is exactly the same for both groups?
Unless you can answer the questions I put to ludovic then your argument is unprovable and hence psuedoscientific tripe. We are supposed to be here to fight ignorance, not promote it.
Princhester I couldn’t give a rat’s if you want to post erroneous an information that demonstrates a complete ignorance of ecology, English language and even basic logic. I will simply point out that it is ignorant and inaccurate and move on. However I suspect the Moderators will have a less casual response.