Scientific debate heats up over fate of Australia's dinosaurs (aborigines killed them)

MonstersandCritics.com ^ | 12/27/06

[Paddlefish]

Palaeontology's angriest argument was given another nudge Tuesday with the release of research that claims Australia's giant prehistoric animals were killed off by Aborigines rather than climate change.

Flinders University's Gavin Prideaux said the fossil record showed that the megafauna - giant marsupials the size of small trucks - were able to survive floods and droughts.

They perished within 20,000 years of sharing the continent with humans, suggesting it was spears that did them in, rather than habitat changes. The giant kangaroos, 2.5-ton diprotodons vanished around 50,000 years ago.

'Climate change was certainly not the main culprit in the extinctions,' Prideaux told Australia's AAP news agency. 'Our data show that the megafauna was resilient to climatic fluctuations over the past half-million years.'

Prideaux's research, published in the latest edition of international journal Geology, goes against a University of Melbourne study released earlier this year that maintained climate change was the culprit.

Melbourne palaeontologist Matt Cupper said his carbon-dating techniques showed the megafauna died out 10,000 years before the first inhabitants had crossed over from Asia.

Since excavations in the 1930s Australia scientists have argued over whether the weather wiped out the megafauna or whether humans did it with clubs and spears.

[Paddlefish]

[Dilbert San Diego]

Gees, the aboriginal people weren't concerned about endangered species were they?

[muawiyah]

Tastes -ed lak' chicken.

[BenLurkin]

a) I think they mean Mega-fauna (NOT dinosaurs)

b) No way the aborigines looked that good. No way.

[exnavy]

LOL that's great.

[Red Badger]

Diprotodon BBQ!.........Yep!, Humans did it!......

[Strategerist]

a) I think they mean Mega-fauna (NOT dinosaurs)

Yep, Megafauna are not dinosaurs. Seriously wrong and misleading headline.

[Red Badger]

Gees, the aboriginal people weren't concerned about endangered species were they?

Yes, they were.......Themselves........

[Red Badger]

I bet it tast-ed more like PORK!......Look at them RIBS!.......

[spintreebob]

WAIT!

When did those human invent fire?
And when did those humans start passing gas?

It still might be humans that caused the climate change.
Go ahead and prove it wasn't. (:

[A. Pole]

You mean you do not like how they look?

[BenLurkin]

The guy on the right looks like Santa Claus.

So that is what he goes in the off-season!

[aruanan]

Scientific debate heats up over fate of Australia's dinosaurs (aborigines killed them)

The megafauna they were talking about didn't include dinosaurs.

[Swordmaker]

When did those human invent fire?
And when did those humans start passing gas?

Good question... but the real question is when did the humans find out you could sneak up behind a farting megafauna with a torch and get a real NEAT explosion... and lots of meat spattered over the landscape.

[aculeus]

Not dinosaurs.

[Brilliant]

We need reparations. Make the aborigines pay for their misdeeds.

[Brilliant]

"They perished within 20,000 years of sharing the continent with humans, suggesting it was spears that did them in, rather than habitat changes."



That's a pretty big jump.

[ApplegateRanch]

As the climate stressed these beasties ability to survive, the humans added another stressor, which in combination they could not over come?

Would that not make the answer to the question, "did the climate kill them off; or did humans kill them off,", "yes"?

GGG worthy?

[ml/nj]

Not very likely that the Australian aborigines killed off the megafauna, IMHO. First it's unlikely that the human population was ever large enough or widely dispersed enough in Australia to have been able to hunt the animals into extinction. Second one has to wonder when these supposed hunters had finished off the megafauna, why they stopped their killing. Were the kangaroos too cute? And third, the same claim is made about the American Indians. That is, that they killed off the American megafauna at about the same time. That's too much of a coincidence. It's much more likely that some worldwide phenomena was responsible for the extinction of these animals.

ML/NJ

[UnklGene]

Tastes like chicken!