The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The idea of 'monsters' of all kinds have always fascinated me. As the article mentions, it's only in the extremely recent past (last couple of hundred years) that extinction was recognised as even something that was possible.
We normally think of extinct megafauna as something that existed in prehistoric times - literally, before we invented writing, but the word here is often by the layman used to mean "before we invented conscious thought". Many Aboriginal Dreamtime stories (so, within the last 80k years) are thought to involve now-extinct megafauna, other large creatures are known to have gone extinct only in the last 2-3000 years, untold small species have disappeared in the last ~200 years... it's hardly surprising that humans are such a superstitious bunch, considering we're only ~8 generations away from huddling in a village, frightened of the wolves and anything else that goes bump in the night.
>Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel
...we don't say that. I don't think even Tasmanians say that. They're too busy trying to convince everyone not avoid the place so they can enjoy it.
More fundamentally there is no reason to think that Australian Aboriginal oral history is anymore reliable than it is anywhere else in the world (i.e. not at all after a few generations).
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The tree sisters story [1] (which was actually taught in schools) is apparently completely fake and the modern highway network apparently resembles the way aboriginals navigated Australia too [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(Australia)#Abor...
[2] https://theconversation.com/how-ancient-aboriginal-star-maps...
Aboriginal people are just people and they don't have some magically ability that allows information to be passed down via oral transmission through 300 generations.
Edit. The huge diversity of Aboriginal languages is proof that information was not transmitted accurately. If you can't even preserve the word for "foot" (just an example) down 300 generations how can it be expected that a story of even less practical utility and far greater complexity would be maintained accurately. The whole idea is ludicrous.
I could see where this kind of cultural and physical mixing (migration) could dilute or mutate folk tales, washing out distinctive 'fact-derived' aspects of the stories
The Basques have been where there are for a long time and they have had a oral culture for most of the time and yet their myths are not any more factual than anyone else's.
Without debating whether the information preserved is factually accurate, it's known that oral cultures develop interesting and complex -- from an information-theoretical perspective -- mechanisms for preserving information, and for making it possible to retain accurately in memory amounts of information that tend to shock people from cultures oriented around writing as the means of information preservation.
If your cultures can't preserve basic words, what possible mechanism could preserve useless facts in complex stories who's purpose is purely to entertain around the campfire?
And if you don't think the old oral epics have value -- you seem not to -- then I don't know that it's really worth discussing them with you.
Their epics just weren't intended for that purpose. You might as well criticize modern literate America for the vast quantities of fact-free written material being churned out.
However there is an odd problem. There is evidence that literacy is in direct conflict with memorizing complex oral traditions. Oral traditions can be surprisingly long - for a well-known example consider that Homer's works were preserved as an oral tradition. People who can read and write are unable to memorize works of this length. And anthropologists learned the hard way that teaching someone who has already memorized things of this length causes them to forget what they previously knew.
Most oral epics and stories were never intended to accurately transmit facts about the past. The idea of history as based on facts is a very recent idea and it is one of the reasons we have so many problems with the written records from ancient historians. They had no problem making up entire stores and conversations that never happened as long as it furthered the purpose of their writing.
The purpose of these oral traditions is not to transmit facts, but to explain to the next generation what is important to their culture and/or entertain.
I think you severely underestimate our predecessors. They were not feral beasts, they were almost exactly the same animals as you and I, minus some education and technology.
8 generations ago (25? 30 years each?), the Age of Exploration in which western European powers sent huge sailing ships, (more than a hundred feet long with dozens or hundreds of cannons) around the world to map and claim unknown lands was drawing to a close, because they were running out of unknown lands. London was a city of more than half a million people, importing goods from the furthest corners of the empire, with huge textile mills and blast furnaces and other factories ramping up,the industrial revolution. They weren't huddling in the mud and dark, they were sitting around candles and oil lamps, near streets lit with oil from whales they killed.
Even 80 generations or more ago the Romans, Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians were dealing with problems of empire governance not wolf packs. (To say nothing of the Chinese, Japanese, or Mayan civilizations which I know less about.)
They may have been superstitious, but they were definitely homo sapiens.
Tasmanian here - I have never heard this either, and have most definitely never said it.
The population in Tasmania was too small to support the genetic diversity required for a sustainable population - the extinction was just a matter of time due to inbreeding. On this topic while there was some hunting, the cause of the collapse of the Tasmanian tiger population is unknown and there is some thought that it might have been due to disease not hunting.
Yes the Tasmanian devil is still alive, but it has almost no genetic diversity. This is why the facial cancer is able to spread from animal to animal.
Edit. I should add the Tasmanian devils were also found on the mainland until the dingos wiped them out too.
100 might be OK for a short drop (~150 is considered the bottom end for most populations), but sustain a population at 50 breeding pairs for a few hundred generations and every allele in the population will end up homozygous though genetic drift.
They only became protected after the last thylacine died.
Subsequent attempts to unprotect and poison them were by idiot farmer who kept deciding they killed livestock.
Anyway, the result of the near extinction caused by humans drastically reduced genetic diversity, which meant even though their numbers did increase they were highly susceptible to any disease, in this case it’s a transmissible disease. Since the 90s their population has dropped by 80%.
As far as thylacine goes - you claim it was introduction of dingoes thousands of years ago, and the there is evidence the aborigines has been present in Australia for at least 10000 years. Yet it wasn’t a hundred years of hunting by Europeans that it went extinct. The causation seems much more to be on the head of humans (specifically Europeans, who have a huge documented history of exterminating animals in land that they migrate to - not to say only Europeans cause extinctions, just that the nature of our society means we have much more documentation of European history than of locations that weren’t well, in Europe)
The Dingo was a rather late arrival in Australia - around 4000 years ago [1]. This was after Tasmania was separated from the mainland by rising sea water after the end of the last ice age which is why they never reached Tasmania.
It is not my claim that Dingos were responsible for the extinction of the Thylacines on the mainland [2] - I just happen to be far more informed about this topic than some posting here.
Source. Australian. Have had near misses with every kind of non-extinct Australian wildlife while riding motorbikes around tassie.
We don't know the economics of recreating an extinct species, but would be most probably not only technically challenging, but also very expensive. Even if we technically could bring back the rainforests to small areas of the sahara, the probability of seeing it done is zero. Is possible, but the huge resources needed are limited and would not allow it.
Saving the vaquita or the totoba, or the frogs, can be challenging but is easier and much cheaper than trying to bring back the same animals from the extinction tomorrow.
I personally would love to see a living Tasmanian tiger and while I don't think I ever will, maybe my grandchildren will.
There could easily be small populations of an animal like this in a place the size of Tazmania, never mind a whole continent the size of Australia...both of which are sparsely populated besides.
Besides that, why would people lie about all the encounters, that are random and coming from many sources, clearly it isn't a conspiracy or something.
I will never understand how people can just smugly write off so many things as impossible, fantasy, myth, superstition, etc. when the world is so big and not that explored, the seas are basically unexplored, and space...well that's really enormous.
A lot of things could be out there, and it is very, very hard to prove with certainty that something doesn't exist, or that the largest of some creature has been caught, or whatever. Scientists love to make proclamations, but they frequently are proven wrong...
You know what I'd really like to see some scientists get around to studying seriously? Crop circles. Still completely unexplained...
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AThyla...
EDIT source : http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-28/healthy-population-of-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapopulation
When the last tasman devil in an area dies, the area is totally cleaned from Tasman devil canker also. A very remote area can be reached only by healthy animals. The only able to endure the travel of several weeks or months.
The area will remain clean for a while. Eventually the boom of animals born in the area with higher survival chances will extend and recolonize the wide empty space between the populations with and without canker.
With a lot of luck all the diseased populations could collapse in this time, and the species could be free of the cancer eventually. With bad luck, an ill animal could get trapped in a truck, travel and be released in the clean area. Being isolated, the remote population would quickly vanish.
The difference with tylacine is that tasman devils have several uncorrupted backups in zoos and also in the wild.
Betteridge's Law applies: no.