Hacker News Reader

Small counter-point: The theory that the Clovis people hunted megafauna to extinction has been challenged a lot by recent research. It looks like North-American megafauna were actually quite likely driven extinct by changes to the climate. Analysis of the prevalence of fungal spores from large herbivore dung suggests that megafauna began going extinct in the northeastern parts of North America, and did so long before the Clovis people - who arrived from the west - would've been there to affect them.

Here's a very well-written article from 2020, from the respected D. Meltzer, that breaks down the evidence really concisely and cites most of the other literature I would point to: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015032117

All of that said, I agree with and want to add to your main point. We did see commercial hunting result in exactly the conditions you described in early American history. Actually, famous commercial hunters like Boone recognized that we were quickly losing the prevalence of wildlife (although it is likely that the prevalence was only there because of the recent demise of the majority of the Indian - and I use that word for the same reason as the author I'll cite - population that had been hunting them, see Charles Mann's "1491").

I find these theories attributing mass megafauna extinction to changes in climate rather unconvincing, for very simple reason: it would be an extreme coincidence that dozens of species that lived there for literally millions of years all just happened to go extinct right around when humans showed up.

Now, I certainly believe that climate changes at the time also played a role: for all we know, these might have even been responsible for most of the animal population reduction, through shrinking the habitat etc. But without the humans killing off the rest, they’d have survived, just like they did during climate changes for previous millions of years — it’s not like the climate just suddenly became unstable recently, after millions of years of high stability.

But yes, the overall point is that humans have produced cultural technology that made us just too good at hunting for it to be sustainable source of calories for majority of population, and this has already been true for many millennia.

I would encourage you to read the current literature. The evidence is more compelling than you might expect. Actually Meltzer’s 2020 paper (linked in my previous comment) touches on this exact concern under the subheading, “Getting past the Impasse”. There was another good paper that broke down how the end of the Pleistocene was radically different from previous glacial transitions and how the effects of that likely played into the extinctions. Combined with the revelation that most mammoth “kill sites” were actually more likely to be scavenged… it’s not at all an unlikely picture.

Thank you for recommendations. It’s been a while since I last skipped sleep to read on these topics, so maybe it is in fact time to catch up with recent ideas. My priors are still strong on humans being ultimately responsible, especially as the entire field is filled with a lot of wishful thinking about the noble nature of savage people, living in harmony with each other and environment.

I suspect it's a combination of both - climate change put the megafauna population under stress, and then humans showed up and dramatically exacerbated their woes.

The extinction of moa in New Zealand is entirely attributable to over-exploitation by humans. The extinction of megafauna in Australia seems to have been climate change + human hunting + human modification of the environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming

> it would be an extreme coincidence that dozens of species that lived there for literally millions of years all just happened to go extinct right around when humans showed up.

Or, it could be that the same climate shift which allowed the humans to show up also was bad for the megafauna.

Hunting rifles almost never go bang, and it is pretty rare that a deer just falls over dead, yet if the two happen at the same time, it is hardly a coincidence.

The linked article might address this better than I have (I haven't read the article yet)

The humans have shown up many hundreds of thousands of years before the extinction of the megafauna, so these 2 events did not have the same cause.

While in the first part of the coexistence between hunting humans and big animals the extinction of various species was more gradual, in Africa and Eurasia, in more recent times the big animals have disappeared almost immediately (at geologic time scales) after the arrival of humans, e.g. in Australia, America and various big islands.

During hundreds of millions of years, there have been many extinction events, and the biggest animals have always been the most affected by them.

Nevertheless, soon after some big species became extinct, other previously smaller species have grown in size, to fill their place.

There has never been a time with a so low abundance of big animals as since the humans have spread all over the world, and it is obvious that no other big animals will emerge naturally, as the cultivated lands have left too little space for them.

The only way for some big terrestrial animals to appear again would be through genetic engineering and they could live only in reservations, like in Jurassic Park.

There is a theory[0] that a series of impact events ~12,000 years ago melted the North American ice sheets over the course of a few days.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...

But it's not a coincidence - the climate conditions changing was what enabled humans to move into the continent. Still, I'd be surprised if human activity wasn't a significant contributor towards species extinction in this case.

While I agree to your point, there's one sentence that hits a pet peeve of mine:

> For most of our history, most humans societies were only barely able to feed themselves. All growth in food supply was quickly matched by population growth.

This, like most clichés isn't strictly wrong, but it's not very true either, at least for agrarian societies. Almost since the beginning of agriculture, agrarian societies have experienced food surpluses, and that's what made the cities appear (as in a pre-industrial society the urban population feeds from the surplus of the countryside). And, at least in Western Europe, until the late middle ages there was a lot woodland completely fit for agriculture[1] that weren't exploited yet, leaving a huge margin for population to grow (and it did in fact, grow). So in most of the history of agriculture, again at least in Western Europe, population wasn't simply linked to the size of the potential food supply. It was probably much truer during the early modern period, when most woodland had been converted (even though the quick adaptation of the British agriculture during the continental blockade showed that there was again quite some margin there).

[1]: we know that they were fit for agriculture, because by the end of the middle ages, they were cultivated.

> Almost since the beginning of agriculture, agrarian societies have experienced food surpluses, and that's what made the cities appear (as in a pre-industrial society the urban population feeds from the surplus of the countryside).

You are confusing an individual-level surplus with society wide one. It is true that a single farmer, with abundance of land, can produce great surplus of food, much more than he or his family is able to consume. However, on a society scale, there was very little surplus overall. In better years, food was quite sufficient for everyone, sure, but in worse years, people starved, especially children, elderly, and the destitute.

This is immediately obvious by looking at the population figures. The population growth everywhere was glacially slow by early modern standards, except when a group moved into previously unoccupied territory, or into territory occupied by groups with with worse food production technology.

Consider, for example, population growth in colonial America and in early decades of USA to population growth in UK. If UK population grew as fast as New England in years 1600-1800, by 1800 UK would have had something like 500 000 000 people (half a billion) living in it. Such rapid population growth was only possible in New England thanks to abundant land, very little of it has been previously used for cultivation by native Americans.

Or look, for example, at the rapid population growth in Africa today. Why hasn’t Africa ballooned to a billion people already in 1800, despite millions of years of head start? Simple: they simply couldn’t sustain populations so high with technologies available to them.

Given right circumstances, the population growth and fall are extremely fast on a historical scale, though it is hard to intuitively comprehend for humans due to us living on a single human lifetime scale.

Technological advances during the middle ages made more land fit for agriculture.

>> During the medieval ‘agricultural revolution’, new forms of cereal farming fuelled the exceptionally rapid growth of towns, markets and populations across much of Europe. The use of the mouldboard plough and systematic crop rotation were key developments and led to open-field farming, one of the transformative changes of the Middle Ages.

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/whats-on/agricultural-rev

But "most of our history" was not agrarian. What you say is correct, but not in contradiction to who you are replying to.

Probably why out of the writers minds come never ending (and boring imho) fantasies of humans hunting humans. I couldnt believe there was imdb tag for it - https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=human-hunting-...

I for one think that it would be good for human psychology and evolution if there was a very different apex predator on par with humans.

This is why I don't eat ocean fish.

95% of the population could decide not to eat ocean fish and there'd still be enough natural demand to cause extinction. You can't solve this type of shared resource scarcity by asking individuals to abstain.

Citation needed.