Posted on 03/08/2010 4:51:57 PM PST by decimon
A team of scientists has discovered that the drastic decline in Arctic musk ox populations that began roughly 12,000 years ago was due to a warming climate rather than to human hunting. "This is the first study to use ancient musk ox DNA collected from across the animal's former geographic range to test for human impacts on musk ox populations," said Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Career Development assistant professor of biology at Penn State University and one of the team's leaders. "We found that, although human and musk ox populations overlapped in many regions across the globe, humans probably were not responsible for the decline and eventual extinction of musk oxen across much of their former range." The team's findings will be published in the 8 March 2010 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Musk oxen once were plentiful across the entire Northern Hemisphere, but they now exist almost solely in Greenland and number only about 80,000 to 125,000. According to the researchers, musk oxen are not the only animals to suffer during the late Pleistocene Epoch. "The late Pleistocene was marked by rapid environmental change as well as the beginning of the spread of humans across the Northern Hemisphere," said Shapiro. "During that time several animals became extinct, including mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, while others, including horses, caribou, and bison, survived into the present. The reasons for these drastically different survival patterns have been debated widely, with some scientists claiming that the extinctions were due largely to human hunting.
(Excerpt) Read more at science.psu.edu ...
Until the scientific mainstream seriously considers the past and potential effects of catastropy, all global models will be incomplete.
If you read the book in Comment #10, you will see that a cataclysmic event probably killed off most of the top predators and their large food animals as well as most of the people in the thriving Clovis culture. Actually, there was a thousand year cooling called the Younger Dryas, and then the warming was reestablished allowing various animals to repopulate, or be hunted as the case might be.
wholeheartedly agree. as an aside, I was kinda surprised at the population level of the musk ox in Greenland.
Wow, every one of them had a Hummer? It’s a wonder they ever left the cave...
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