Bering Strait: humans not responsible

Permalink: Bering Strait: humans not responsible

A recent report highlights an important claim - that environmental change was primarily responsible for the extinctions of megafauna from the Ice Ages.

Previously, some researchers had tried blaming very small numbers of humans for wiping out entire species, simply by the killing of a few choice animals from any population.

A reflection on the modern relationship between humans and animals, should have clearly wiped out any suggestion that the meagre post-Ice Age human population, could have been responsible for collapsing such extensive populations. After all, humans have been hunting for thousands of years, but had yet to make a point to decimate common and widespread megafauna until the industrialisation of Europe.

Climate - not early human hunters - may have caused the crash in bison populations and the extinction of other big mammals at the end of the last ice age, suggests a new study.

An analysis of the genetic diversity of bison shows that the decline in Beringia - the prehistoric land mass joining Alaska and Siberia - began 37,000 years ago, more than 20,000 years before large human populations reached the area.

And the bison were lucky they did not go extinct as the ice sheets melted about 10,000 years ago, unlike other ice-age megafauna such as sabre-toothed cats.

It is a “big surprise” that the decline began long before people arrived, says Alan Cooper at Oxford University, UK, a member of the international research team. He had thought early North Americans wiped out the megafauna, much like human settlers are believed to have devastated the flightless moa of New Zealand.

From: Climate helped wipe out large mammals