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Comment by longitudinal93 | Hacker News Reader

It's the same story in Australia. Several large slow creatures that disappeared shortly after the arrival of humans. I think trying to pin the blame solely on the weather is simply because it's much more in sync with the "stewards and custodians of the land" narrative that is currently so fashionable.

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Or simply because we don't have evidance of Homo Sapiens in the Americas until ~20k years ago, 30k years after megafuana extinction.

The extinction doesn't seem to have happened 50k years ago in North America. That seems to have been made up by whoever wrote the headline. The date of 50k years ago does not seem to appear anywhere in the linked academic paper, does not correspond to climate change at the start of the current interglacial, and does not correspond to evidence of the arrival of humans in North America. Even the body of the phys.org article doesn't say the extinction happened then.

There were wooly mammoths alive in 2000 BC, 600 years after the Great Pyramid was built. There is evidence of humans and mammoths being in north America together.

https://www.livescience.com/woolly-mammoths-in-north-america...

My thoughts as well. If the native Americans had the technological ability to extinct the Buffalo they would have done it. Just as they killed off many more fragile species and other tribes. Life in pre Colombian America was just as nasty as it was in post Colombian America.

> If the native Americans had the technological ability to extinct the Buffalo

I think it's more the case of if they didn't have the ability to create a balance. Things like the creation of the Amazon rainforest and the domestication of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, quinoa, llamas, etc. were because Native Americans figured out how to do those things. It's likely though that the first Native Americans just didn't know that stuff yet and accidentally ate all the mammoths or whatever because they didn't yet have a tradition of "only eat the mammoths when the third moon rises after Orion returns" or whatever. Those kinds of cultural traditions are social technologies, and they enable ways of life that would otherwise collapse in a few decades.

In the Pacific, Hawaiians and others had seemingly useless taboos like "women can't eat bananas" but following the taboo rules sustained a huge population (estimates for Hawaii vary, but it was at least a significant fraction of the current population without international shipping!).

In the Amazon, manioc is a great staple crop… as long as you serve it exactly right so you don't slowly poison yourself. They figured that out, but I'm sure there were many generations that got it wrong before they got it right.

So I don't think the framing should be "plains Indians didn't know how to kill off the buffalo." Rather a) plains Indians didn't have horses pre-European contact, so that whole way of life didn't exist until modernity and b) balancing with nature is a learned cultural achievement.

> Things like the creation of the Amazon rainforest

Kind of a ridiculous myth when you consider the diversity of life uniquely adapted to the various micro environments of the amazon rainforest. It would be multi-million-year terraforming project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_agriculture_in_t...

No, it's not about any woo woo natural balance. Mammoths were really easy to kill and if they were anything like their elephant cousins would have taken 10-15 years to reach sexual maturity. Their population would also be considerably lower and larger animals are more sensitive to change because they reproduce slower and their are fewer of them.

Buffalo on the other hand reach sexual maturity at 2-3 years, there were many more of them. They replaced their populations faster.

The first humans in North America didn't extinct buffalo because they couldn't, they would have had to have much more population and civilization progress before that became a risk.

You are right. But you are trying to educate a political vital mythos away, that just can not die. The noble savage always wins, as it is a coreconcept of the back to nature "movement".

It's not "noble savage" to note that Native Americans domesticated numerous crops used globally today and that such domestication was a technological achievement, much like the domestication of the horse in central Eurasia or the cultivation of rice in Asia. It's basically the opposite idea: rather than being "naturally" in balance with nature, Native Americans figured it out the same way humans figured everything else, through trial and error, and at the cost of countless lives. It is closer to the stereotype to believe that Plains Indians had some kind of timeless way of life, instead of recognizing they occupied a temporary historical niche that lasted between the introduction of the horse and the near extinction of the buffalo. Introducing history to our understanding of Native American achievements and failures is the only way to treat them as equally human as every other culture.

citation needed.

I have yet to come to a satisfying explanation for the origin of that fetish.

I suppose in the absence of any historical record you can make up whatever story you like, but the self flagellation that comes with it is so weird.

Isn't is just the noble savage fallacy as usual?

Yeah but what’s with the masochism attached to it?

My theory it's due to the plethora of nature documentaries making humans into villains. It worked.

I thought it was accepted that Australian megafauna went extinct due to humans. But could also be a combination of factors e.g weakened by a climatic shift then finished off by newly arrived human predators

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