there are rumblings that the ~10k year ago megafauna die off was far too rapid to have been done by relatively unsophisticated humans and is likely to have been caused by a comet fragment impact or similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
Genetically, not too much. In terms of population density and technology, we absolutely have changed, and both are relevant to our ability to clear a continent of dozens of species of animals at a rapid rate.
Maybe the environmental conditions that allowed for humans to invent agriculture also spelled doom for the megafauna. If the world of relevant scientists agree that this is an open problem, it doesn't make sense to just pretend like we know the answer because it suits us in whatever manner.
The fact is: We don't know what killed off the megafauna.
Rhinos in Africa were killed off for asian medicinal customers.
We also don't know that gravity works. All we know is that when we drop things they tend to end up on the floor. There have been enough experiments of isolated islands and continents being colonized by humans and having all their large animals go extinct within a century that the two are as correlated as anything we can expect in science.
The only reason to claim that humans are not the cause is an emotional one: to pretend that we have been at peace with nature in some mythical past. The alternative, that modern humans have always been an ecological disaster wherever they went, is not something that's palatable to many in the West since it means the noble savage wasn't.
Come on
I will double down and die on this hill. You cannot compare your confidence in this theory to the fundamental physical laws.
Saying that, if we are 10,000 years into a Mass Extinction, how many more years before we can start gene editing to bring back extinct animals like the Dodo?
I dont think we are more than a decade or two away from that, plus we are also now able to grow meat. Sure we havent solved the nuclear radiation problem for energy, but fusion seems to be close, I think the longest experiment was China running a fusion experiment for just over 15minutes.
So are we at the point where some of us can now actually play God!?!
False. 30+ genera vanished from North America in a geological instant, at the same time as the Clovis culture. Dire wolves, cheetahs, sabertooths, horses, camels, a bear much bigger than the grizzly, woolly mammoths, mastodons. A layer of platinum-enriched dust is left from that instant, with bones below and none above, Clovis points below, none above. Where do you imagine the Clovis people got all that platinum dust, and how did they scatter it all across the continent? And, where did they go after that?
Lions survived on the Greek mainland into the classical era, possibly eliminated finally by Romans.
A few reserves maybe. In Africa they do mostly fine because there is a lot of undeveloped land. Develop the land and give a population a use for space, megafauna disappear. That’s what’s happening all over Africa now.
When Europeans arrived in the US, the climate stayed reasonably static for a long time but the animals disappeared. Is there another reason except humans?
But what's fascinating is that the arrival of Europeans in the US is hypothesized by some to have led to a dramatic cooling event called the "Little Ice Age".
Quoting from the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#Decreased_human...
Other researchers have supported depopulation in the Americas as a factor and have asserted that humans cleared considerable amounts of forest to support agriculture in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans brought on a population collapse.[134][135] Richard Nevle, Robert Dull and colleagues further suggested that not only anthropogenic forest clearance played a role in reducing the amount of carbon sequestered in Neotropical forests but also that human-set fires played a central role in reducing biomass in Amazonian and Central American forests before the arrival of the Europeans and the concomitant spread of diseases during the Columbian exchange.[136][137][138] Dull and Nevle calculated that reforestation in the tropical biomes of the Americas alone from 1500 to 1650 accounted for net carbon sequestration of 2-5 Pg.[137] Brierley conjectured that the European arrival in the Americas caused mass deaths from epidemic disease, which caused much abandonment of farmland. That caused much forest to return, which sequestered greater levels of carbon dioxide.
Because they evolved with us and evolved to respect the threat we pose.
I don’t feel guilty about our past, and I accept my responsibility to do better (within my learned and adopted value-system where ecological diversity is important for resilience during inevitable change, and where the human story carries on unbroken for some arbitrary length of time. That seems meaningful, and maybe the best way is through culture and oral tradition?). It’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling, and important to decide what to do next.