#also uhhh wrt to climactic events this doesnt bode very well for our remaining megafauna huh

[grubloved]

"In Australia, Cosmos recently reported a fossil discovery that revealed giant birds, reptiles and marsupials died out 40,000 years ago due to extreme climatic conditions and environmental degradation.

Across the Pacific, a new study published in the journal Nature Communications has linked North American megafauna extinctions during the Late Quaternary to extreme temperature changes – not with overhunting by humans, as suggested by some.

More than 10,000 years ago, many giant critters roamed the continent, including mammoths (Mammuthus) and enormous beavers (Castoroides), horses, ground sloths (Megalonyx) and a one-tonne armadillo look-alike, the Glyptodon.

What drove their extinction is a “contentious topic”, according to Mathew Stewart from Germany’s Max Planck Institute and team, led by senior author Huw Groucutt.

Some blame human population growth and the arrival of highly skilled “big-game” hunters around 14,000 years ago, for which the giant animals were no match. Others argue that archaeological evidence doesn’t support this notion, pointing to climatic and ecological disruptions."

[...]

"Results [of this new study by Huw Groucutt et al] showed megafauna populations had no associations with human numbers but were consistently correlated with temperature. As North America warmed up their numbers increased, and their subsequent declines and extinctions coincided with the cold snap.

However, the team says the story is likely to be much more complex and needs to be considered along with ecological changes associated with climatic variation – and humans could also have contributed indirectly through other means such as habitat fragmentation. They call for researchers to develop more reliable methods to clarify what really happened."

#wild #also uhhh wrt to climactic events this doesnt bode very well for our remaining megafauna huh #reading #history #interested to see how this develops #i do think a lot of ppl learned like once that #humans killed all the mammoths/etc or whatver #where like theres a lot of exinctions we have on record from colonization onwards #the idea tht we like bring destruction to everything wherever we go has never reeeaaally been a complete picture #like lmao. humans originated in africa and have lived there the longest out of anywhere on the planet but it has more megafauna #than anywhere else still! #also i do think that like #ok. hear me out: extinctions are not necessarily . a bad thing theyre part of the cycle #its ok if over 3827492749 years things moved in and out. thats fine #whats CONCERNING is when we start doing fuckall and then everybody starts dying real fast. thats the issue #like critters gotta extinct sometimes. #our job is like. to make sure it isnt bc we are doing shit we shouldnt be doing #predators gotta predate. we just also gotta make sure we keep that shit in check because we're smart enough to know how to. #thats the burden of being human: we belong but we forget and also we can overstep our boundaries so we gotta learn to do things on purpose #we don't have to live alone!! #we don't have to live alone!