What Happened to the Megafauna?
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
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.
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.
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.)?
Humans can throw a bunch of spears at the biggest thing they can find and follow it until its injuries to do it in. That's great from the perspective of being able to get a lot of food, but not so great in that you're killing off the healthy breeding population.
They can just jog after a wildebeest for 8 hours until it overheats, and then they can throw rocks at its head.
That being said, I don’t think your final comment is true (minus the part about farming) due to scale. Sure early humans spent just about all of their effort on hunting, but there weren’t many humans back then. Nowadays we spend much less effort on a given task, but because that effort is distributed amongst billions and billions of people we end up collectively putting in even greater amounts of effort than was likely possible in ‘early human history’.
You leave out the human pursuit which has occupied most of our intellectual and physical resources since we first fashioned tools: war.
Excerpt from the chapter - Guilty as Charged: "Various human species had been prowling and evolving in Afro-Asia for 2 million years. They slowly honed their hunting skills, and began going after large animals around 400,000 years ago. The big beasts of Africa and Asia learned to avoid humans, so when the new mega-predator – Homo sapiens – appeared on the Afro-Asian scene, the large animals already knew to keep their distance from creatures that looked like it. In contrast, the Australian giants had no time to learn to run away. Humans don’t come across as particularly dangerous. They don’t have long, sharp teeth or muscular, lithe bodies. So when a diprotodon, the largest marsupial ever to walk the earth, set eyes for the first time on this frail-looking ape, he gave it one glance and then went back to chewing leaves. These animals had to evolve a fear of humankind, but before they could do so they were gone."
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.
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...
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
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."
I just get triggered at low-effort skepticism. Tomsaga read the word "stable" and assumed it meant "absolutely stable", and didn't ask himself "huh, I wonder if the pop-sci article is masking a more complicated concept with an easy-to-digest concept".
To get more into the climate stability: What they're doing is measuring the difference in temperature and precipitation between the Last Glacial Max and the Last Interglacial. And the maps don't even have `0` in their range, they have a small number but not zero. So yes, climate wasn't stable, but they were able to measure "how stable" it was. (Pages 1-3 in the paper.)
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.
If the discussion was "who is more likely to be right", well, that's a different matter and I'd agree with credentials. But that's not an interesting discussion really.
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.
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.