Are Humans to Blame for the Disappearance of Earth’s Fantastic Beasts? (2017)

smithsonianmag.com

9 points·pezzana··6 comments

Some. Maybe the woolly mammoth of Wrangel Island, off Siberia, and the cave lion and rhino of Europe.

But 32 genera of megafauna vanished from North and South America, and some even in Africa, right at the boundary of the 1200y-long Younger Dryas cold spell, 12,900ya, along with the Clovis culture, and and coincident with a layer of platinum-rich carbon. I'm blaming that on a bolide strike.

to me, the fact that Africa is the only place where the majority of megafauna have survived to present day is the best proof that we caused them to die off elsewhere. African megafauna evolved with humans as they emerged and learned to treat us with due caution.

To me, that is proof that we are not responsible for as much as we are blamed for.

Take a closer look at history. Fauna in Africa survived because people were busy killing other people.

And, people on other continents were not killing one another?

History records only a minuscule fraction of the human past, and most of the extinctions (until very recently) occurred well before there were even means to record history. I don't see how you would be able to draw any such conclusion, even if it were true.

Recently I researched on white bisons. Apparently they are prone to being struck by a lightning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_buffalo

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