Posted on 06/12/2012 7:03:32 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Although human hunting played a part in the demise of the woolly mammoth about 10,000 years ago, homo sapiens were but bit players in a global drama involving climate change, comet impact and a multitude of other factors, scientists have found in separate studies.
Previous research had blamed their demise on tribal hunting. But new findings “pretty much dispel the idea of any one factor, any one event, as dooming the mammoths,” said Glen MacDonald, a researcher and geographer at the University of California in Los Angeles, to LiveScience.com.
In other words, hunting didn’t help, but it was not instrumental. The ancestors didn’t do it.
So what did? After thriving for 250,000 years, the huge mammals lingered on in dwarf form in the Arctic Ocean’s Wrangel Island until 3,700 years ago. Between 20,000 and 25,000 years ago, LiveScience said, the animals declined during the worst of the last major ice age, though they started to multiply in warmer interior Siberia.
(Excerpt) Read more at indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com ...
Interesting.
Something large and catastrophic froze those mammoths in place. Many of them still had undigested food still in their stomachs, and their bodies were perfectly preserved in ice.
Now, what on earth can drop the air temperature so fast that it can instantly freeze something as big as a mammoth?
I don’t have a ready answer for that, but it happened. One of the more curious things, though, is that explorers haven’t found a similar number of quick-frozen humans in the same areas.
Post of the year!
Heh! *bows*
I’ve commented on this before. They are called “temperature inversions” of the severest kind. They occur when very cold upper air drops due to condensed moisture at near freezing temperatures.
When it lands on earth, because of its massive size, it kills by a literal flash freezing, all life. It freezes the lungs of living creatures which explains why the mammoths still had buttercups and other freshly eaten plants in their stomachs (not digested).
While my description might be somewhat general, I believe that it is close to what a massive temperature inversion can do.
Some holes in massive cloud formations are attributed to temperature inversions. I don’t have any more information on this except that photos of such holes show a nearly uniform circular pattern, like a donut hole does.
I would appreciate any additional information as it has been decades since I last read up on this subject.
For all they know a virulent strain of flu killed them off.
I just finished reading this book, “The Cyclle of Cosmic Catastrophes.....”, and the authors demonstrate over and over and over (ad nauseum) if fervent pieces of evidence from all over North America (particularly) that there was, in fact, some impact that sprayed debris across the continent. The author also points out that it was not only the large mammals that disappeared at precisely the same time, but tiny little rodents that would be pretty hard for man to extinguish. This article is barely a snippet of what is in the book. It left me as a believer.
In AFTER the It was aliens dude. :(
A few thoughts.
First, humans have been very effective at wiping out large, dangerous animals in many other circumstances. Everywhere we show up, whether it is Northern Europe, the Americas, or Australia, most of the large, dangerous animals die off shortly thereafter. I doubt that is a coincidence. The example of the buffalo is flawed because they were not very dangerous to humans, and because the sheer size of the buffalo population was massive compared to the amount of mammoths that could be supported in a similar sized region. I’d guess we’re talking on the order of thousands to one.
Your argument about the effectiveness of hunting large vs small prey is based on false assumptions. Small prey is faster and more elusive than large prey. It takes more time to hunt them, better technology and skill to effectively kill them, and they provide only a small amount of protein for the effort. Humans weigh the calculus of all this, and usually take down the biggest prey they can manage, to get the greatest return on investment. For example, Eskimos subsist on whale meat, not on seals or fish, even though they would seem to be the easier targets. Same thing with your example of the buffalo. Hunting rabbits or deer might seem easier than going after buffalo with spears or bow and arrow, yet we had whole societies of humans who decided to get most of their meat from following the buffalo herds.
Also, look at the example of other top tier predators like lions. They’ll kill anything they can to satisfy their massive need for protein, but their hunting behavior is quite different for large and small prey. They’ll stalk a herd of gazelles or antelope they come across, to get a quick meal, but they are lucky to grab one of them, and that meat will satisfy the needs of the pride for only a very short time. When they encounter a giraffe, on the other hand, they will herd the beast to a battleground where they can gain the upper hand, and then spend hours in mortal combat with it, taking much greater risks, in order to secure a much larger meal that can provide them food for days.
“Humans didn’t kill off the cats ~ hunger killed them!”
The two aren’t mutually exclusive, since we are predators competing for the same food sources, and humans have proved to be more effective in most circumstances. The cats have had to retreat to places with enough food to support us both, or where they have a clear advantage over us.
Also, your theory doesn’t explain why big cats died out in the Mid-east and Mediterranean long after the glacial periods were over, but at the same time that human societies were becoming more advanced technologically.
I think the problem is, you might be looking for a “big pattern” that explains them all, while each separate extinction probably has its own unique causes. Humans cause some extinctions, other predators cause some, changes in habitat, climate, or availability of food sources cause others, etc.
Why do they have to be superhuman? Simply being human is enough. If we set our minds to killing something, we are going to find a way to do it, that’s the human spirit.
Can we kill it with an arrow? Nope. How about a spear? Nope. Hey, let’s scare it with fire until it runs in that box canyon, then Ugg and Nodar can push boulders off the cliff onto its head!
You of all people should know better than to underestimate what ancient humans were capable of dreaming up, man!
“Now, what on earth can drop the air temperature so fast that it can instantly freeze something as big as a mammoth?”
That’s the million dollar question, and I can’t answer it either, but I’m pretty certain it won’t be explained via “gradualism”.
Once you get past momma. (Run, Forest! Run!)
Interesting. I just read a bit about it, and it can happen when a less dense warm air mass passes above a more dense cold air mass. The normal circumstances wouldn’t seem to produce something of the magnitude you are talking about though. Then I read these sentences:
“An inversion is also produced whenever radiation from the surface of the earth exceeds the amount of radiation received from the sun, which commonly occurs at night, or during the winter when the angle of the sun is very low in the sky. This effect is virtually confined to land regions as the ocean retains heat far longer. In the polar regions during winter, inversions are nearly always present over land.”
Ok, so what if an event causes an unheard of drop in the amount of solar radiation received from the sun? For example, if the upper atmosphere was suddenly choked with light colored particles creating a more reflective albedo effect? I’m thinking supermassive volcanic eruption or something of that nature. Air circulation patterns mean that the poles would be the last place for the dust to disperse to. If the dust from the larger volume of air near the middle of the planet concentrated in the smaller volume at the poles, packing the dust in tighter, combined with already lower temps at the poles, you could see a significantly colder inversion than in other regions.
I agree that humans can be effective at wiping out species, but that is a relatively recent event.
Guns or poisons, it’s up to you.
I’m certainly not claiming that man never took a mammoth, there is plenty of irrefutable evidence he did.
What I am saying is that it was probably a rare event. A much more frequent event would have been half, if not more, of the hunting party being ripped to shreds, the tribe losing their strongest and bravest hunters. The cost of a mammoth kill would have been simply enormous.
Consider also that there were quite a number of species that went extinct at the same time, also that there were islands off of Northern Siberia that had quite large mammoth populations, islands that were not inhabited by men. Mammoths disappeared from those places as well.
ALTHOUGH!!
There have been infrequent references to people in the early 1900’s having mammoth sightings in various places, so it’s certainly possible that a small indigent population still exists somewhere.
And the evidence is becoming almost undeniable that a large comet or small asteroid struck North America about 12,500 years ago, and it was an Earth-changing event.
Do you really think that primitive man armed only with sharp rocks tied to sticks could actually kill enough mammoths to cause them to go extinct? There is very little fossil evidence showing humans hunted Mammoths, if they killed off enough of them to cause extinction then there would have been much more evidence of hunting.
Hunting something that large with spears tipped with flint heads would have been too dangerous and too difficult to be attempted on any scale at all.
The proof of that are Elephants. Elephants never declined in numbers until the event of firearms, African natives rarely killed them and then they used traps to do so.
When the ice ages started to warm up, glaciers melted, leaving tons of water, small lakes etc. Grass and other vegetation grew in abundance giving rise to the large mammals that once roamed the earth, as the glaciers moved further and further north, the water gradually declined, meaning the vast amounts of vegetation could no longer be supported, causing the death of the giant mammals, except in certain areas, such as Africa and then only a few of the big species survived such as Elephants. The large carnivores also went because their food died out, or are you going to tell me that men using sticks and sharp rocks killed off the ferocious Cave Bears, bigger and meaner than grizzlies, and sabre toothed tigers?
I know this sounds silly, but I'd like to run a scoreboard where FReepers can contribute to the semi-official tally.
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