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Comment by Aloisius | Hacker News Reader

The NYT article covers the context of the responses, the climate change vs. overkill debate w.r.t megafauna extinctions better: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/science/mammoth-extinctio...

It always seemed like a false choice to me. It's not like humans need to literally hunt a species to extinction to wipe it out. We can (and have) done it by disrupting the food chain, altering environments and introducing invasive species as well.

The push back against ancient humans causing or at least, significantly contributing to extinctions feels odd. Few would argue that human activity, even absent hunting or advanced technology, can threaten species today, but for some reason it's considered impossible for ancient peoples.

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Ancient humans causing extinctions and environmental change is at odds with the image of "indigenous societies are perfect environmental stewards", which has been popularized for various reasons.

Human predation of mammoths probably contributed to their eventual extinction, but the changing climate almost certainly played a large role as well. If humans hadn’t been around to hunt them they’d probably be extinct anyway. When they finally did go extinct about 4,000 years ago, they were only present on one island way up in the Arctic circle.

Additionally, during the same time period megafauna in Africa have (well, until recently) continued to thrive despite the presence of humans and earlier hominids for millions of years.

The difference is that humans were not native to the Americas, and arrived rather suddenly some tens of thousands of years ago. Meanwhile animals in Africa (and Asia and Europe which were populated much earlier than the Americas) spent much more time co-evolving with humans as predators.

> If humans hadn’t been around to hunt them they’d probably be extinct anyway.

Why? They survived greater climatic change/habitat loss before.

I think your last paragraph contradicts your first one: Most likely, they would not have gone extinct anyway, since similar megafauna in Africa that co-evolved with humans (like elephants) didn’t go extinct despite the climate change.

It makes sense though if their ancestors drove edible species to extinction on arrival, starved for generations while trying to adapt to what they have done, and then ended up with a more sustainable culture afterwards as a reaction.

Not unlike how our current wave of sustainability is a result of ruining our environment.

The presence or absence of wolves in Yellowstone result in quite different ecosystems. It would be hard to see how ancient humans would not similarly alter it.

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