A comet from a supernova killed off the mammoths. Yes, you read that correctly. More junk science from Berkeley, September 24, 2005. Life's too short to list the things that are wrong with this idea.... San Francisco Chronicle.
The Americas
The La Brea Tarpits. Actually, this is redundant, because La Brea means "tar".
Fighting between bull mastodons: a brilliant study by Dan Fisher, October 2003.
Science Daily
Florida
South America
Human Arrival in the Americas
New thinking in this area suggests that fisherfolk spread along the west coast of the Americas before Clovis people occupied the inner continent. The fisherfolk had little or no effect on the continental ecosystem (though I suspect that they affected coastal ecology dramatically).
The Yana site in the Siberian Arctic. A report in January 2004 documented humans in the delta of the Yana River, on the shore of the Arctic Ocean in Siberia, about 135° E longitude. But the DATE is 30,000 radiocarbon years ago, more than that in calendar years, in glacial times. This is VERY far north for Homo sapiens at such a date, in such a cold climate. There was abundant large-mammal and bird game, but even so, this is extraordinary. It also puts cold-adapted humans within striking distance of the Bering Strait before the last Glacial Maximum at around 20,000 years. Are these the ancestors of the Clovis invaders of North America, or the mysterious fisher folk that might have been pre-Clovis. We do not know yet. The paper was in Science 303: 52-56, and comment, p. 33. National Geographic News
Pre-Clovis Arrival and the Coast Route
Evidence from linguistics:
The Monte Verde site, in Chile
New evidence of pre-Clovis people at Cactus Hill, Virginia:
an article from the New York Times, April 11, 2000.
The Meadowcroft site:
The Meadowcroft site, which suggests pre-Clovis arrival. Feature article, October 2000.
Kennewick Man from the Columbia valley. On a separate page.
Europeans as the First Americans?
This is mainly the work of Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian. It's fair to say most people do not believe it. Here is his suggestion
Survivors
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Bison kill by Clovis people in Oklahoma. National Geographic News, July 22, 2002. Usual knee-jerk reactions by the folks who don't like the overkill hypothesis. Russell Graham says, and I quote, "The [..] bison kill provides ample proof that Clovis people were actively hunting bison; why didn't they become extinct?" I could ask the same question about the Indians that hunted bison for the next 10,000 years. Bison breed a LOT faster than mammoths, mastodons, etc., so are much more resistant to hunting pressure.
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So who killed off the buffalo?. It's not as simple as you thought.
Australia
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A 1998 ABC (that's Australian Broadcasting, by the way) TV show looked at the Blitzkrieg idea, with Tim Flannery kindly guiding viewers toward his own conclusions. Here's the first part of the transcript, with images: you can easily find the rest.
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Text of a 1997 talk by Tim Flannery summarizing the timing of Australian extinctions.
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Text of a second 1997 talk by Tim Flannery summarizing the nature of Australian extinctions
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First Australians at or a little after 50,000 years ago.
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Press release from University of Melbourne
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National Geographic News
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Burning by Australian aboriginals: more sophisticated than I describe in the book. On Earth magazine, 2005. The brief story: most Australian landscapes burn anyway: from lightning storms, mainly. What the Aboriginals learned to do over tens of thousands of years was to set many small fires that then prevent the huge catastrophic ones that occur today. This does not alter the fact that Aboriginals altered the Australian ecology with their firesticks: it does emphasize that they were (and are) very good at fire management in a dry continent.
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Large Pleistocene horned tortoise from Lord Howe Island: Meiolania
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Thylacoleo, the marsupial "lion"
Thylacoleo was a pretty good carnivore. National Geographic news, March 5, 2004. There's a bit of a "straw man" here. Thylacoleo has been regarded as a pretty good carnivore for quite a while. Also, it's difficult (for me) to believe that the giant Australian monitor was only as big as the Komodo dragon: we have bones, after all. The world's expert, Peter Molnar, suggests that it about as big as a large crocodile.
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The Tasmanian Wolf/tiger
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Dinnertime at Cuddie Springs: Human hunting and butchering Australia's native megafauna?
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2010 update: paper on better dating of the Cuddie Springs site
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The Australian marsupial Diprotodon may have been close to 3 tonnes. National Geographic News, October 17, 2003. OK, the new estimate is 50% bigger than previous estimates. But it doesn't put it out of range of early human hunters! You wound it, or snare it, or poison it: you don't run up and try to stick a spear in it, or play a didgeridoo at it until it surrenders.
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The dingo of Australia has very little genetic variability. BBC News OnLine, September 30, 2003. The most likely explanation is that all dingoes surviving today were descended from a very few ancestors (which probably arrived by boat from Indonesia). (They didn't sail the boat: at least, if they did, they have lost that ability in later generations.)
Island Extinctions
Madagascar:
Text of a 1997 talk in which David Burney summarizes extinctions on Madagascar.
The dodo Europeans killed off the dodo on Mauritius. Long Wikipedia article, updated to 2013.
Cuba
The Bahamas
The Bahamian crocodile, and other stories
Polynesia
New Zealand
Experienced Faunas
Northern Eurasia
Talk in 1997 by A. J. Stuart on European extinctions.
Pleistocene Mammals in Russia, at the Russian Paleontological Institution
The most important local extinctions in the Old World took place in habitats that modern humans were invading in strength for the first time. The large mammals were hunted out of the optimum part of their range, and then the last survivors hung on in the inhospitable (usually northern) parts of their range until newly invading humans or climatic fluctuations killed them off. For example, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant deer, along with horses, elk, and reindeer, reinvaded Britain from Europe after the ice sheets began to retreat and birch woodland and parkland spread northward. Mammoths flourished in Britain until 12,800 BP at least, but then human artifacts appeared at 12,000 BP, and the largest animals of the tundra fauna quickly disappeared.
The giant deer called the Irish elk (not Irish, not an elk) survived until about 7700 years ago, in Siberia.
Neanderthals and CroMagnons in SW France. Press release, September 23, 2003. This study shows that there were practically no differences in hunting practices between Neanderthals and CroMagnons. The data deal with prey species found in caves that were occupied first by Neanderthals and then by CroMagnons.
Mammoths
Frozen mammoths from Siberia.
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How do you keep mammoth meat fresh? Dump it in the lake! News item on the work of Dan Fisher of the University of Michigan: The research project.
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How do you butcher a mammoth? Instructions and pictures from Texas
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Reconstructions of a mammoth-bone dwelling on the plains of Eastern Europe...
Ice Age fashions, and the origin of weaving.
Olga Soffer argues that evidence of woven textiles revises our view of Cromagnons and their contemporaries in Eastern Europe. And she's probably right: for example, is this the long-sought secret weapon of CroMagnons in competition with Neanderthals?
My wife says that weaving doesn't mean looms, as the newest story suggests, but that's a minor point. Kids begin weaving without looms, and graduate to them.
The World Today
The New World syndrome of diseases
Gila Indians and diabetes: the grim view from the National Institutes of Health:
And finally, here are a few links that you should only check if you are feeling strong.
Wrecking the world's ecosystems
The reference list for Chapter 21
Page last updated April 8, 2013.
Most links checked March 26, 2013.
[For Chapter 20, click here ]
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