


Gone but not forgotten

Details of how people killed off species in the past may have implications for whether they do so in the future

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Readers' comments



CJ Lives

While I realize that science is not obligated to produce intuitive results, I've always thought that alternative theories for the large mammal extinctions are really reaching.

I mean, we've got means, motive, opportunity. A consistent MO. Murder weapons. And the suspects have no alibi whatsoever.

If early humans didn't do it, then it was the cosmic frame-up job of all time. :-)


Those earlier humans were smart enough and hungry enough to kill the magafauna (probably it wasn't that difficult either to dispatch the unexpecting beasts and large birds), but not smart enough to realize that the pantry is emptying faster than the rate of replentishment. The real question is weather their smartened descendants are able to discern the writings on the wall. Will the good soil, potable water, oil, and fisheries last in perpetuity to offer us a continuous source of food, or they will go the way of dodo bird?

Shielding C

I really appreciate the point about the complexity of eco-systems. In our digital world, we tend to think boxes and squares, calculating the effects of our technologies under the misapprehension that all variables are being accounted for. Hence the swiftness with which entrepreneurs grasp at genetic modification of food and other living things. We think that if we haven't observed a negative consequence, there isn't one, and therefore we should feel free to implement irreversible changes in our environment. I wish we had evolved from rabbits - maybe then we'd look before we leap.

@KCCM: Yes, this period in the past coincided with a warming period. However, if you remember that the period identified by the article spans "from 50,000 to 5,000 years ago" you might understand why scientists and concerned citizens today are getting 'worked up' over the intensity of global warming caused by the human emission of fossil fuels into the atmosphere. The amount of warming has not yet exceeded warming that occurred in the earth's history, but the rate is unprecedented and that is what is so alarming.



I love your dark sense of humor.
Perhaps there is a reason why one should be extremely thankful to those currently advocating not taking the H1N1 Vaccine.

by the way, the word for killing off an entire race is genocide and the perpetrators can be charged at world court. Is there an equivalent word for the killing off of an entire sub-species? Not that it saved the Maoris of course, the last pure blood Maori pass away well over a decade ago.

serban p.

It is only common sense from a natural selection point of view that the sudden introduction of a new species in an environment will disturb the equilibrium of that environment. Humans as the new predators on the block can easily have caused the extinctions of large edible mammals that could not adapt to their presence. To condemn long ago humans for not foreseeing the consequences of their actions is silly. They just continued doing what they had been doing for generations. We on the other hand have no excuses.


It was fairly recently that Atlantic fishers looked up and said, oh, we really have fished some species to near extinction. For years they denied it because, well, fish were still getting caught in their nets. Now that they aren't they get it, but as with our forebears, it may be too little realization too late.
Humans are also easily capable of extinction due to the superiority complex: "if manatees were meant to survive they'd get out of the way of the boat's propeller blade better" or "well can't the spotted owls learn to live in some different trees" or "brown bears need to realize they can't have as much habitat any more".
Finally, it seems that nature with it's geometric growth patterns was not well equipped to deal with humans exponential growth patterns. The leaps in medicine, sanitation, and all things that make most of the world live longer are also what help us to destroy what supports us without realizing or meaning to.


The real lesson may be about the relative merits of hunter-gathering and farming. Farming may get a bad press but hunter-gathering produces a tragedy-of-commons effect that is far worse. If early Americans had valued and looked after their horses they would have survived.

The obvious modern implication is for the last of today's hunter-gatherers - the fishermen.


I deeply regret missing the chance to savor how the meat of all these animals tasted before it became unavailable. One can only imagine how some now-extinct game meat would make our current farm- and steroid-raised fodder seem worthless by comparison.


Past cohabitation with endangered species is only explicable as a failure of technology. Easter Island and any number of extinctions prove man's innate capability to ignore the obvious in a desire to exterminate all living others regardless of harm to self.


There is some evidence that the extreme climate and habitat changes during this period (dwarfing anything we are getting worked up about at the moment) also contributed significant stresses that the larger mammals felt most. For example, the end of the Quaternary glaciation drastically reduced the tundra/grasslands that were preferred mammoth habitat. Certainly, these same stresses greatly diminished early human populations just before our ancestors left Africa. Incidentally, another large-mammal species that became extinct at this time was our Neanderthal cousins who, it seems, had existed for a quarter million years or so exclusively on a diet of large mammals.
So, our highly competitive hunting skills and adaptability may have helped get us to this point, but the article does well to stress learning over moralization. As the climate continues to change and there is, literally, no room left for agriculture, our currently-preferred food providence method, what's next?
Postscript: With the decline in the popularity (and availability) of hunting, the main threat humans now pose to other species is habitat encroachment. Unless they adapt well to human habitat (e.g., racoons, deer and, to some extent, coyotes in North America) there is now no habitat left for other mammals.


In that case, enjoy the Tuna sushi while you can, because that (and possible whalemeat) is going to be the next meat that's going to disappear from the market soon...

Kristina Brooker1

Since being responsible to shareholders implies that shareholder's interests are more important to the person talking for the company then being treated legally and safely, I expect this to also be a dilemma when discussing the survival of plant and animal species.

I have a particular fondness for oil conservation, I don't think it is necessary to change oil to a gas. Changing oil to a gas is very expensive if it is not necessary since oil has so many uses in it's solid and liquid phases. However the profit of the oil companies involved with eliminating this very STUPID use for oil maintain this demand to burn oil.


Rita Book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg

From about 50,000 to 18,000 bp Antarctica showed a decline in average temperatures from -4 to -8 degrees Celcius relative to the present, with a few-hundred-year oscillation of about 2 degrees. Over the next six thousand years Antarctic temperatures increased almost ten degrees and then set to a new, relatively level 2 degree oscillation, which we are currently at the bottom of. Despite the models and hand-wringing about current temperatures, Antarctica has stayed at the bottom of that oscillation.

At least according to the Antarctic record, the only visible effect human activity MAY have had on global climate (perhaps through our widespread use of agriculture and deforestation) is to have helped maintain average temperatures over the last few thousand years versus the gradual post-peak decline Antarctica shows after the prior three glaciations.

Once climate scientists and the IPCC come up with credible models that explain the Antarctic record, I'll pay more heed to dire warnings of impending doom.


It's not just the big creatures we're killing off this time, it's flora and micro-fauna, too. We're gonna miss all those microbes, fungi, amphibians, reptiles, plankton, coral, grasses, flowers, and trees when we discover that the whole ecosystem might collapse without them. We'll have to cultivate a taste for pond scum, then. That's about all we'll have left, if we're lucky.
Jim, http://cyclopsvuethinks.blogspot.com


The only (very small) comment that I wish to add is that presumably whilst co-existence was initially the order of the day, humans reproduced and killed more, i.e. a tipping point was reached.
Keith Sykes


So I conclude that what the world needs most is a machine that can efficiently process the fast-breeding rat for human consumption.

If concurrently we could overcome our Holocaust-induced taboo regarding eugenics...well there might just be hope.

airborne cigar

A/B Cigar
Human beings are without doubt the most pitiless and the greatest predators to have ever lived on the planet .In the event that its resources are pillaged to the point where survival is at stake, or our failure to curb pollution produces a similar result ,when all other creatures have dissapeared the surviving humans will be Homo Sapiens var. Americanus !


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