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> Defined as large-bodied terrestrial mammals with a mean adult body mass of 2,200 pounds or more, today’s remaining megaherbivores comprise the likes of elepha

> Defined as large-bodied terrestrial mammals with a mean adult body mass of 2,200 pounds or more, today’s remaining megaherbivores comprise the likes of elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and hippopotamuses. Was there difference in hunter-gatherers in europe/asia/americas compared to africa? Why hadn't the ancient elephants, giraffes, etc been hunted to extinction? > I think work over the past few decades has rather convincingly demonstrated that humans had a pretty substantial part in the extinction A substantial part in the extinction? What does that mean? The extermination of the buffalo in the US required industrial scale resources ( guns, railroads, etc ) along with the migration of millions of europeans and habitat loss ( via farming ). It was a conscious and intentional effort. Are they claiming something similar happened throughout much of europe, asia and americas more than 50,000 year ago? > “When we restore forests, we can’t just think about the trees,” he says. “We must think about the animals that belong there.” This. The most devastating blow for the buffalo, wolves, bears, etc was habitat loss. It was ultimately what did them in. Did ancient hunter-gatherers alter their environment to such a degree to wipe out herds of giant animals from entire continents? I have a hard time believing that hunter gathers in tiny tribes traveling on foot with primitive weapons could have hunted and wiped out entire species of large animals from continents. I wish they would give more specifics.

graemep 2y ago
> Was there difference in hunter-gatherers in europe/asia/americas compared to africa? Why hadn't the ancient elephants, giraffes, etc been hunted to extinction? Elephants and rhinos do survive in Asia.
mr_toad 2y ago
> Was there difference in hunter-gatherers in europe/asia/americas compared to africa? Why hadn't the ancient elephants, giraffes, etc been hunted to extinction? One theory is that they gradually adapted as humans developed. Once humans spread out to other continents the change was too rapid for the megafauna on those continents to adapt.
- simonh 2y ago
  Also there were megafauna extinctions in Africa, just over a longer period of time. Then humans expand out of Africa, and within a few tens of thousands of years most of the extra-African megafauna are gone.
nkrisc 2y ago
> Was there difference in hunter-gatherers in europe/asia/americas compared to africa? Why hadn't the ancient elephants, giraffes, etc been hunted to extinction? Consider that African megafauna have co-existed with early hominids and eventually humans for millions of years. They may have simply adapted to human predation successfully enough to survive, as one factor. Whereas in North America and elsewhere you have the sudden (on the evolutionary time scale) arrival of Homo Sapiens who are likely already very skilled and advanced hunters among a population of prey animals that have never experienced such a predator. It’s also possible that in tandem, climate change was less severe in Africa than elsewhere over the last 50k years.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  Right, we're a native species to Africa, so its whole ecosystem evolved with us. I think of this when I hear about "poachers" killing animals in African nature reserves. How often is that hunter gatherers who been there for thousands of years, and whose hunting is/was really part of the ecosystem?
  - hanniabu 2y ago
    Comparing hunting with rudimentary weapons to hunting with modern firearms is insane
    - yCombLinks 2y ago
      Not to mention modern mobility
      - hanniabu 2y ago
        Plus cameras and drones
        adolph 2y ago
        Wild hogs seem to handle it pretty well
AlotOfReading 2y ago
They don't know any particular specifics. Our understanding of human organization during the late pleistocene and early Holocene is poor, bordering on non-existent. However, I don't find it particularly hard to imagine humans as a major factor, even if I have some doubts about this particular argument. First, you have to understand that about the late quaternary extinctions, we know not all quaternary extinctions were anthropogenic. Ecosystems were experiencing a lot of different stressors around that time, and by the time extinction actually happens there may have been only small populations left for centuries or millennia. Ecological resilience is also a bit of a funny thing. You might think that you make 10 species extinct has 10x more impact than just 1 extinction, but there isn't a linear relationship. In many ecosystems, there's very little impact from most local extinctions as the graph thins out until all the systemic resilience is gone and the whole thing suddenly collapses into a new state. Did that proximate cause(s) of the last extinction cause the rapid shift? Fantastically deadly hunters like humans that are specialized to megafaunal hunting being able to push the most vulnerable and stressed parts of the ecosystem over the edge isn't an obviously absurd argument to me.
alfiedotwtf 2y ago
Thinking out loud… I wonder if it could still be true based on the fact that the larger the animal, the longer the gestation period. For small animals like rabbits, it’s about 30 days - so their chances of “multiplying like rabbits” is obvious - you’re not going to wipe out rabbits faster than the supply. As you move up the size scale, the gestation period gets longer and longer, and each kill gets harder to replace (wales come in at around 18 months!). Kill a mega-sloth and its chances of species survival dramatically drop!
- shawn_w 2y ago
  The number of offspring in each litter tends to drop with increasing size, too.
deadbolt 2y ago
> The most devastating blow for the buffalo, wolves, bears, etc was habitat loss. Wasn't the most devastating blow to Buffalo the campaign by settlers to slaughter them, since they were important to the native Americans?
- daemonologist 2y ago
  True for the American bison (as far as I know), but there used to be a bunch of species in Eurasia which went extinct or had their range dramatically reduced as part of the broader extinction of megafauna discussed in the article.
- dghughes 2y ago
  I think the word buffalo really confuses people. Bison are in North America while buffalo (small b) are in Asia and Africa. >Wasn't the most devastating blow to Buffalo the campaign by settlers to slaughter them I hope everyone in the city of Buffalo, NY are OK lol
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
  - LeFantome 2y ago
    You are of course correct. In North America at least though, I do not believe many people are confused. The term “buffalo” is used much more commonly than “Prarie Bison”. I am not defending it but it is ubiquitous to the point that everybody knows what people mean when they say “buffalo”. If somebody said “buffalo” to me, I would assume they meant bison ( unless I had additional context ). If they meant Asian or African buffalo, I would expect them to say “water buffalo”. Again, I am not arguing what is correct. I am commenting on what I think people, as a group, understand.
Earw0rm 2y ago
Not all megafauna are herd animals on the scale of American buffalo. Others were limited to smaller areas or less numerous to begin with, and the ones that survive are probably those that started off most numerous. African elephants are hanging on by a thread, relative to their original number they're down something like 98%. Africa is also _huge_ - around four times the size of the entire continental USA - and suffered perhaps less during the Ice Ages than Northern America or Eurasia, where megafauna would have been squeezed by both the ice - and associated climate changes further south - and a hungry and increasingly innovative human population.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> I have a hard time believing that hunter gathers in tiny tribes traveling on foot with primitive weapons could have hunted and wiped out entire species of large animals from continents One thing humans could was starting fires that would drive many animals into a designated killbox, among other ways of "cheating". Humans were uniquely capable (at this size scale, at least) to both hunt species in excess to their need and cause outsized damage to their habitat in the process.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  The default is to outpace your need. Imagine if we evolved to somehow hunt just enough meat. There’d be some of us with less efficient systems for controlling that behavior that end up starving while they think they are bringing in enough food. Thats no good for reproductive fitness. Overshooting on the other hand is good. Another factor, symbiotic relationships tend take much longer to evolve that carefully balanced relationship between symbiont and symbiont. Parasitic relationships tend to evolve sooner and its also not uncommon the parasite overshoots and kills off its own host.
trhway 2y ago
>I have a hard time believing that hunter gathers in tiny tribes traveling on foot with primitive weapons could have hunted and wiped out entire species of large animals from continents last mammoth died just 4000 years ago on an Arctic island - i.e. without humans they survived far longer even in pretty harsh conditions.
christkv 2y ago
They are guessing. Probably a ton of compounding factors rather than a single one. Ice age (probably a big one for anything not in Africa), hunting, habitat compression, food competition, etc. I'm also guessing :)
nihzm 2y ago
> I have a hard time believing that hunter gathers in tiny tribes traveling on foot with primitive weapons could have hunted and wiped out entire species of large animals from continents. I wish they would give more specifics. This made me recall having read something related to it in the book Sapiens [1]. Indeed, I went looking and quoting from chapter 4 > All the settlers of Australia had at their disposal was Stone Age technology. How could they cause an ecological disaster? There are three explanations that mesh quite nicely. > Large animals – the primary victims of the Australian extinction – breed slowly. Pregnancy is long, offspring per pregnancy are few, and there are long breaks between pregnancies. Consequently, if humans cut down even one diprotodon every few months, it would be enough to cause diprotodon deaths to outnumber births. Within a few thousand years the last, lonesome diprotodon would pass away, and with her the entire species. [...] > The second explanation is that by the time Sapiens reached Australia, they had already mastered fire agriculture. Faced with an alien and threatening environment, they deliberately burned vast areas of impassable thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands, which attracted more easily hunted game, and were better suited to their needs. They thereby completely changed the ecology of large parts of Australia within a few short millennia. [...] > A third explanation agrees that hunting and fire agriculture played a significant role in the extinction, but emphasises that we can’t completely ignore the role of climate. The climate changes that beset Australia about 45,000 years ago destabilised the ecosystem and made it particularly vulnerable. [...] So the extinction was on a very different timescale from your buffalo example, but an extintion nonetheless. In the ellipses the book briefly points to some evidence to support these theories. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Hu...

graemep 2y ago

> Was there difference in hunter-gatherers in europe/asia/americas compared to africa? Why hadn't the ancient elephants, giraffes, etc been hunted to extinction? Elephants and rhinos do survive in Asia.

mr_toad 2y ago

> Was there difference in hunter-gatherers in europe/asia/americas compared to africa? Why hadn't the ancient elephants, giraffes, etc been hunted to extinction? One theory is that they gradually adapted as humans developed. Once humans spread out to other continents the change was too rapid for the megafauna on those continents to adapt.

simonh 2y ago
Also there were megafauna extinctions in Africa, just over a longer period of time. Then humans expand out of Africa, and within a few tens of thousands of years most of the extra-African megafauna are gone.

nkrisc 2y ago

> Was there difference in hunter-gatherers in europe/asia/americas compared to africa? Why hadn't the ancient elephants, giraffes, etc been hunted to extinction? Consider that African megafauna have co-existed with early hominids and eventually humans for millions of years. They may have simply adapted to human predation successfully enough to survive, as one factor. Whereas in North America and elsewhere you have the sudden (on the evolutionary time scale) arrival of Homo Sapiens who are likely already very skilled and advanced hunters among a population of prey animals that have never experienced such a predator. It’s also possible that in tandem, climate change was less severe in Africa than elsewhere over the last 50k years.

BurningFrog 2y ago
Right, we're a native species to Africa, so its whole ecosystem evolved with us. I think of this when I hear about "poachers" killing animals in African nature reserves. How often is that hunter gatherers who been there for thousands of years, and whose hunting is/was really part of the ecosystem?
- hanniabu 2y ago
  Comparing hunting with rudimentary weapons to hunting with modern firearms is insane
  - yCombLinks 2y ago
    Not to mention modern mobility
    - hanniabu 2y ago
      Plus cameras and drones
      - adolph 2y ago
        Wild hogs seem to handle it pretty well

AlotOfReading 2y ago

They don't know any particular specifics. Our understanding of human organization during the late pleistocene and early Holocene is poor, bordering on non-existent. However, I don't find it particularly hard to imagine humans as a major factor, even if I have some doubts about this particular argument. First, you have to understand that about the late quaternary extinctions, we know not all quaternary extinctions were anthropogenic. Ecosystems were experiencing a lot of different stressors around that time, and by the time extinction actually happens there may have been only small populations left for centuries or millennia. Ecological resilience is also a bit of a funny thing. You might think that you make 10 species extinct has 10x more impact than just 1 extinction, but there isn't a linear relationship. In many ecosystems, there's very little impact from most local extinctions as the graph thins out until all the systemic resilience is gone and the whole thing suddenly collapses into a new state. Did that proximate cause(s) of the last extinction cause the rapid shift? Fantastically deadly hunters like humans that are specialized to megafaunal hunting being able to push the most vulnerable and stressed parts of the ecosystem over the edge isn't an obviously absurd argument to me.

alfiedotwtf 2y ago

Thinking out loud… I wonder if it could still be true based on the fact that the larger the animal, the longer the gestation period. For small animals like rabbits, it’s about 30 days - so their chances of “multiplying like rabbits” is obvious - you’re not going to wipe out rabbits faster than the supply. As you move up the size scale, the gestation period gets longer and longer, and each kill gets harder to replace (wales come in at around 18 months!). Kill a mega-sloth and its chances of species survival dramatically drop!

shawn_w 2y ago
The number of offspring in each litter tends to drop with increasing size, too.

deadbolt 2y ago

> The most devastating blow for the buffalo, wolves, bears, etc was habitat loss. Wasn't the most devastating blow to Buffalo the campaign by settlers to slaughter them, since they were important to the native Americans?

daemonologist 2y ago
True for the American bison (as far as I know), but there used to be a bunch of species in Eurasia which went extinct or had their range dramatically reduced as part of the broader extinction of megafauna discussed in the article.
dghughes 2y ago
I think the word buffalo really confuses people. Bison are in North America while buffalo (small b) are in Asia and Africa. >Wasn't the most devastating blow to Buffalo the campaign by settlers to slaughter them I hope everyone in the city of Buffalo, NY are OK lol
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
- LeFantome 2y ago
  You are of course correct. In North America at least though, I do not believe many people are confused. The term “buffalo” is used much more commonly than “Prarie Bison”. I am not defending it but it is ubiquitous to the point that everybody knows what people mean when they say “buffalo”. If somebody said “buffalo” to me, I would assume they meant bison ( unless I had additional context ). If they meant Asian or African buffalo, I would expect them to say “water buffalo”. Again, I am not arguing what is correct. I am commenting on what I think people, as a group, understand.

Earw0rm 2y ago

Not all megafauna are herd animals on the scale of American buffalo. Others were limited to smaller areas or less numerous to begin with, and the ones that survive are probably those that started off most numerous. African elephants are hanging on by a thread, relative to their original number they're down something like 98%. Africa is also _huge_ - around four times the size of the entire continental USA - and suffered perhaps less during the Ice Ages than Northern America or Eurasia, where megafauna would have been squeezed by both the ice - and associated climate changes further south - and a hungry and increasingly innovative human population.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> I have a hard time believing that hunter gathers in tiny tribes traveling on foot with primitive weapons could have hunted and wiped out entire species of large animals from continents One thing humans could was starting fires that would drive many animals into a designated killbox, among other ways of "cheating". Humans were uniquely capable (at this size scale, at least) to both hunt species in excess to their need and cause outsized damage to their habitat in the process.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
The default is to outpace your need. Imagine if we evolved to somehow hunt just enough meat. There’d be some of us with less efficient systems for controlling that behavior that end up starving while they think they are bringing in enough food. Thats no good for reproductive fitness. Overshooting on the other hand is good. Another factor, symbiotic relationships tend take much longer to evolve that carefully balanced relationship between symbiont and symbiont. Parasitic relationships tend to evolve sooner and its also not uncommon the parasite overshoots and kills off its own host.

trhway 2y ago

christkv 2y ago

They are guessing. Probably a ton of compounding factors rather than a single one. Ice age (probably a big one for anything not in Africa), hunting, habitat compression, food competition, etc. I'm also guessing :)

nihzm 2y ago

> I have a hard time believing that hunter gathers in tiny tribes traveling on foot with primitive weapons could have hunted and wiped out entire species of large animals from continents. I wish they would give more specifics. This made me recall having read something related to it in the book Sapiens [1]. Indeed, I went looking and quoting from chapter 4 > All the settlers of Australia had at their disposal was Stone Age technology. How could they cause an ecological disaster? There are three explanations that mesh quite nicely. > Large animals – the primary victims of the Australian extinction – breed slowly. Pregnancy is long, offspring per pregnancy are few, and there are long breaks between pregnancies. Consequently, if humans cut down even one diprotodon every few months, it would be enough to cause diprotodon deaths to outnumber births. Within a few thousand years the last, lonesome diprotodon would pass away, and with her the entire species. [...] > The second explanation is that by the time Sapiens reached Australia, they had already mastered fire agriculture. Faced with an alien and threatening environment, they deliberately burned vast areas of impassable thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands, which attracted more easily hunted game, and were better suited to their needs. They thereby completely changed the ecology of large parts of Australia within a few short millennia. [...] > A third explanation agrees that hunting and fire agriculture played a significant role in the extinction, but emphasises that we can’t completely ignore the role of climate. The climate changes that beset Australia about 45,000 years ago destabilised the ecosystem and made it particularly vulnerable. [...] So the extinction was on a very different timescale from your buffalo example, but an extintion nonetheless. In the ellipses the book briefly points to some evidence to support these theories. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Hu...