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Re: Large animal extinctions caused by early man
Stephen Barnard (steve@megafauna.com)
Sun, 30 Jun 1996 14:35:38 -0800
Bob Keeter wrote:
>
> Sounds reasonable to me! While I might not go so far as to
> say that mankind didnt contribute to the demise of at least
> some of the mentioned megafauna, but to give a scattering of
> nomads armed with stone tools credit for killing off the
> megafauna is a bit of an ego trip. Case in counter-point,
> animals that must definitely be classified as megafauna (i.e.
> elephants, rhinos, giraffes, hippos, etc) survived the
> human "stone age" quite nicely in an equatoial band reaching
> across Africa, the middle east, the Indian sub-contiinent
> and southern Asia. If the theoies of paleoanthropology are
> correct, these areas probably had man as a preditor, gnawing
> at the food chain, far longer than the American Great Plains.
>
One point of view that I've heard is that Pleistocene megafauna
survived in Africa because they had the opportunity to co-evolve with
humans. The Pleistocene fauna in the Americas, however, were clueless
and therefore vulnerable.
I don't know whether it's true, but it's plausible.
Steve Barnard
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