
What Happened to the Megafauna? - DmenshunlAnlsis
https://daily.jstor.org/what-really-happened-to-the-megafauna/
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stupidcar
Imagine if, instead of spending your childhood, teenage years and early
adulthood in schools, you just spent it learning to hunt, then continued to
learn and practice hunting for the rest of your life. Imagine if everyone in
your family, and everyone else you knew had also spent their entire lives
learning to hunt and hunting. Imagine if every genius born into every
generation devoted their entire intelligence to the problem of hunting, from
their first moment to their last. Imagine if this had been going on for
generation after generation, with knowledge and expertise refine and passed
down through mentorship and oral tradition.

Collectively, it's a level of intellectual effort that humanity has likely
never brought to bear on any other problem besides, perhaps, farming. As such,
it's perhaps no surprise that early humans were spectacularly successful at
hunting so many of even the largest and most fearsome animals to extinction.

~~~
jessriedel
> Collectively, it's a level of intellectual effort that humanity has likely
> never brought to bear on any other problem besides, perhaps, farming.

I mean, if you are measuring in terms of brain cycles, perhaps. But huge
amounts of these brain cycles were wasted because people lived in small tribes
and information decayed quickly in space and time, requiring everyone to
continually re-invent things. And the detailed knowledge for hunting one type
of animal in one region was not particularly applicable to other animals in
other regions, so these are to a large extent just different problems.

~~~
UrukParthian
IIRC, in the absence of writing, humans had great oral memory. Not only that
but they used other mental tricks. EX: Aborigines connecting myths to places
in terms like "... And this is where angry bear slept for three days. The
water here is still poisonous today from his angry urine..." and so on.

I would say it's more precarious than "modern knowledge" but we haven't really
tested the longevity of tech civilization. There are still tribes in Siberia
who tell legends of the hunter of the sky tracking the great deer. The
"problem" is that they're talking about a set of constellations that were last
visible 20000+ years ago. If disaster strikes, how many mediums will be
rendered useless (floppies, CDs, lithograph, tapes, etc.)?

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beloch
When we go to a museum and see skeletons or life-size models of Pleistocene
megafauna, we tend to assume these animals behaved just like the wild animals
of today: wary, elusive, and ferocious if cornered. Then we consider the size-
difference and shudder.

However, extinct megafauna may have behaved differently. The wild animals of
today are the product of tens of thousands of years of intense selection
pressure from humans. It's possible that a Mammoth behaved less like an
African elephant and more like a Dodo. i.e. Humans migrating into areas where
humans were previously unknown may have encountered animals that didn't view
them as threats and which did not evade pursuit or defend themselves as modern
wild game does.

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acidburnNSA
"Mammals went extinct as humans expanded, and they went extinct in areas where
the climate was stable but humans were new."

That squares with something I think I read in Guns, Germs, and, Steel, which
was that the reason African megafauna like elephants, lions, etc. survived to
this day is that they co-evolved alongside humans to the point that they knew
to be afraid of the puny little buggers. Meanwhile a 2-ton giant marsupial in
Australia had no reason to fear and evade the new bipedal neighbors, or so it
thought...

~~~
tim333
There were also a lot of 'germs' in Africa that kept human numbers in check
until very recently.

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tomgaga
I don't buy this. If the article explains it correctly, the argument is that
they can show that in place where the climate was stable, and humans were new,
the megafouna went extinct. But that implies that they believe that there were
places on the planet were the climate was stable. If you look at the greenland
Ice core data, you can see extreme peaks and falls around the last quarterly
extinction. So sounds like BS to me.

~~~
civilian
Well then, let's try "relatively stable" rather than "stable".

These are scientists who probably have some idea of how to measure variance.
You're some rando on the internet shooting from the hip. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's the paper, go wild:
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/43601643](https://www.jstor.org/stable/43601643)

~~~
genericone
I think you are being downvoted because you are using the appeal to authority:
'trust them, they have credentials that say they should be trusted on this
very subject'.

This repurposed quote from the raiders of the lost ark might also work:

"I assure you ... We have top men working on it!"

"Who?"

"Top. Men."

~~~
cnasc
I think an appeal to authority is only fallacious when it's an appeal to an
authority that has no relevant expertise. Something like "my dentist says that
anthropogenic climate change isn't real, you don't think you're smarter than a
doctor do you?"

In contrast, when it comes down to John Q. Internet vs a scientist with
relevant expertise, I think it's a reasonable heuristic to think the scientist
is more likely to be correct.

IMO the downvotes were more related to the delivery than the content.

~~~
Kaivo
Interestingly, there seems to be an equality bias[1] where the experts
opinions weight no more than any other person's opinion. So apparently the
reasonable heuristic isn't always applied in how we perceive and judge
information.

[1][http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3835](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3835)

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sunstone
Perhaps the komodo dragon was the only megafauna to turn the tables on the new
humans.

~~~
flukus
I suspect they just taste bad.

~~~
vanderZwan
IIRC, their hunting method consists of having saliva that is so infested with
pathological bacteria that they simply bit their prey and wait for it to
succumb to fevers.

Somehow, I doubt eating their meat is a healthy thing to do, even when cooked.

EDIT: turns out that the BBC documentary I got that from has outdated
information:

> _Although previous studies proposed that Komodo dragon saliva contains a
> variety of highly septic bacteria that would help to bring down prey,
> research in 2013 suggested that the bacteria in the mouths of Komodo dragons
> are ordinary and similar to those found in other carnivores._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon#Saliva](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon#Saliva)

~~~
sunstone
On the other hand komodo dragons actively hunt humans which is pretty
impolite. I would expect that bad habit would lead to their extinction on a
small island but it hasn't.

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woodandsteel
Interesting, but it raises the question of why the global extinction didn't
happen before. Was there a sudden improvement in human hunting techniques? Or
did they stay the same, but the added factor of climate change made it
possible for the two of them together to do it, or what?

~~~
autokad
the last ice age peaked about 21k years ago and ended about 11.5k years ago.
Humans have been around for about 200k years, so it probably took some time
'getting on its feet' and reaching critical mass with the ending of the ice
age to cause a global impact.

i myself do think we played a larger role. Woolly mammoths actually survived
till about 4000 years ago by being in the most remote islands possible. To me,
its like something you would see if there was some sort of zombie apocalypse
and the last humans only survived in some remote island, far far away from
land. Eventually, humans did reach that island, to which the mammoth
immediately died off. Though climate change probably played a role, and could
have been the primary one, I don't feel it was.

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m0llusk
We ate them. Now we are the megafauna. Will we eat ourselves?

~~~
kridsdale1
Zombies are terrifying for a reason. It’s our strengths turned against us.
They never stop pursuing.

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Taniwha
TLDR: we ate them

~~~
tim333
Or got annoyed with them. Modern elephants, lions and tigers tend to get
problems if they do in crops or villagers.

