Chapter 4. The Flood
Humans got into Australia, and in a very short period, a lot of big mammals when extinct, was the human the cause?
Guilty as Charged
Some scholars try to exonerate out species, putting the blame on climate. Is the alibi valid?
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This wasn’t the first climate change, and a lot of species that went extinct survived the other, maybe more severe climate change just find.
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Sea creatures wasn’t affected that much, yet climate change hit both of them pretty hard.
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Whenever other part of Australia is “found”, a bunch of species go extinct, over and over again.
Mammoth population in Wrangel Island in the Artic Ocean, another example.
How did we drive them to extinct? 3 explanations
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Large animals, bred slowly aka low birth rate. A kill every few months, over a few centuries, would be enough to wipe them out.
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We have fire; evidence: The prosperity of Eucalyptus trees in Australia
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There had to be some effect of climate change, and Homo Sapiens was just the last push to get them over the edge.
The End of Sloth
Sapiens move to America: Sibera to Alaska, some glaciers blocked any more progress before climate change (around 12,000 BC). When they melted, there were nothing stopping them.
Within 2,000 years, most of the megafauna were wiped out.
This time, the evidence is clear, we were the culprit.
Noah’s Ark
200 genera to 100 genera, before farming.
I think this sub-chapter stands by itself.
Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo Sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.
Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolution. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources.
My thoughts
Living in a somewhat urban environment, and thinking about the world in general, I had this weird feeling of: why do I see so few animals everyday? I may see I’m no biologist, but I felt like there has to be more biological diversity than dogs, cats, pigeons, and sparrows that I can see everywhere. An ecosystem as diverse as amazon rainforest should’ve been the norm, why isn’t it that way?
This chapter answered my question: we drove a lot of them to extinction
Greaaaat….. I probably should’ve expected that.