this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Today I Learned (TIL)
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I knew horses were brought over in the 1500s, but I didn’t realize they had previously been here! I wonder what the primary cause for extinction was- climate? Disease? Predators?
Homo sapien expansion after the last glacial maximum is a strong contender, but my understanding is that we don't yet have enough data to rule out environmental changes, or sufficient resolution to really prove it was us.
The most convincing argument I've heard points out that Africa - where we evolved - has more surviving mega-fauna than any other continent. If animals who had more evolutionary time to develop strategies for coping with humans are way more likely to survive, that strongly suggests we played a large role.
It's an area of ongoing research without a definitive answer though.
Not only had they previously been here, they evolved here first and migrated out through Siberia when it still connected the continents.
The interesting part is that they evolved in America, crossed over to Asia (and from there to Europe and Africa) through the Bering land bridge, and then went extinct in America together with the American megafauna (possibly because of overexploitation by recently arrived humans, possibly due to climate change, possibly a combination of both), only to be reintroduced later on.
The usual reason, probably.
So death?
People. The secret ingredient is people. Pretty much any large species of mammal (or bird) that went extinct in the past 10.000 years or so was hunted to extinction.
Environmental changes. Got it.
I mean I guess everything is an environmental change. Meteor does are just a very rapid environmental change. Bullets: highly localized change in environment.
My point is that humans hunting is barely a blipp on the radar on a larger scale. Like that time 70-80% of all species on this planet went extinct and people still argue about why.
People have this weird view of nature having equilibrium or balance. It never has and never will. Nature is constantly changing whether we are here or not. We mostly notice when our prey animals die out.
Definitely people think nature is an equilibrium when it's actually very dynamic.
But also humans change their environments a lot. Even North America's first nations.