Hi:
I was just reading about the
latest attempt by scientists to link the megafauna extinctions with climate change. The temperature swings were no more violent than any of the others in the
past several hundred thousand years, but the recent ones supposedly wiped out all of the world's easy meat, and humans had nothing to do with it. I call it
defending one's in-group. With those correlations of climate change and extinction, humanity is absolved. The far more important correlation is that the megafauna quickly disappeared whenever
behaviorally modern humans arrived, and they had the means,
motive, and opportunity to do it, like nothing else in the history of Earth. Australian scientists, probably because the climate change hypothesis is the least tenable for the
Australian megafauna extinctions,
churn out paper after paper on why climate did it instead of people. There is truly a fetish about the
mammoth extinctions, but such studies ignore or downplay their cousins who
did quite well for many millions of years, to
all suddenly go extinct when humans arrived, from plains to rainforests to woodlands. Elephant cousins did well over the
length and breadth of the Western Hemisphere for millions of years, as did an
assemblage of megafauna that looked just like Africa's, through numerous climate change episodes, to suddenly
all go extinct when humans arrived. I don't buy the climate change explanation, and neither does any disinterested scientist that I have seen
who has looked into it. Climate change has
certainly played a role in mass extinctions, but what happened, climate-wise, with the expansion of humans across Earth was truly unremarkable, as far as
this ice age goes. Mass extinctions of entire
guilds of multi-ton herbivores and their predators, only happened with the
Permian and
Cretaceous extinctions, which had infinitely greater environmental havoc than melting ice sheets. The climate change explanation for the megafauna extinctions does not fly, IMO. The only climate-induced mass extinction since the dinosaurs' demise was the
mid-Eocene one, which was when Earth's plants and animal changed from hothouse to icehouse species dominating.
Thanks Freeknowledge, yes indeed, the
rise of industrialization meant the end of drudgery and other suffering, in ways that today's Westerners can have a hard time imagining. It was
all muscles a few million years ago, the
development of stone tools and the
control of fire began the rise to
Homo sapiens. And it has been the exploitation and exhaustion of
one energy source after another (including those megafauna) ever since.
Best,
Wade