ANU boffins say it wasn’t climate change that did for the megafauna

justin heywood said :

One journal article doth not a scientific fact make – and on this topic there hundreds of articles, mostly with a different point of view than that expressed by Field and Wroe.

There well may be “hundreds” of articles on the subject but that doesn’t change the fact that the archaeological record is so sparse as to be unable to differentiate between the competing hypothesis. I wouldn’t have thought it would be too outrageous to suggest that we just don’t know and probably will never know.

Thumper said :

Tiger Quolls the size of action buses!

Look at the Zygomaturus trilobus. That is Latin for ‘big as three ACTION buses, but not as old or orange.’

Gungahlin Al said :

thebrownstreak69 said :

We’re talking about wooley mammoths here, right?

No Mammoths were restricted to the Siberia/North America areas. When referring to Australian megafauna, scientists are talking about all the bigger animals – including current ones, but mostly talking about the extinct ones. Picture a 3m 2000kg wombat, a 500kg emu and a 7m goanna! Not actually those animals but they resembled the current species, just huge.

Pretty good summary of it all in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna

Tiger Quolls the size of action buses!

thebrownstreak69 said :

We’re talking about wooley mammoths here, right?

No Mammoths were restricted to the Siberia/North America areas. When referring to Australian megafauna, scientists are talking about all the bigger animals – including current ones, but mostly talking about the extinct ones. Picture a 3m 2000kg wombat, a 500kg emu and a 7m goanna! Not actually those animals but they resembled the current species, just huge.

Pretty good summary of it all in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_megafauna

justin heywood said :

howeph said :

Roundhead89 said :

Oh dear. Crash goes another climate change myth.

Roundhead89, you must be smarter than me, because I can’t see any climate change myth crashing down.

Please explain.

In fact, a change in the climate is one of the competing theories in explaining the disappearance of the megafauna. A very interesting topic, but a bit of a perfect storm of competing scientific theories unfortunately complicated by politics.

What do you mean by ‘complicated by politics’?

Whenever this topic comes up, respectful discourse between scientists degenerates into a childish sand-pit of denigration, ad homs, etc. There are only a few cases where this happens, usually with some underlying financial/political/or ideological contention.

I’m wondering what that political complication is in this case(??)

davo101 said :

CraigT said :

The problem with stating the obvious, “Humans arrives and hunted the megafauna to extinction”, is that it goes against the noble savage fantasy of the Aboriginals as “caretakers of the land” and similar rubbish such as trying to paint fire stick hunting as a land management technique instead of the destructive vandalism that it was.

No the problem is that there is not enough evidence to state this. To quote Field and Wroe (2012):

In our view the question remains wide open. Arguments for either a human- or climate- driven process remain based on major and currently untested assumptions. Notably, acceptance of a human-driven event assumes that the PGM and LGM were no more severe than the glacial maxima that preceded them and that a lack of evidence for most now extinct species post-PGM is a sampling artefact. Arguments for a climate-driven process may assume the reverse. Neither position is strongly supported by hard evidence at present, but it is increasingly clear that the climate was deteriorating at the time humans are thought to have arrived. The unknown number of megafaunal species present at human arrival faced possible direct or indirect influences from humans and increasingly arid and variable climate. Even with the advantage of far better resolved palaeoclimatic data and extinction chronologies than are presently available, it would be difficult to quantify the respective roles of either factor robustly.

One journal article doth not a scientific fact make – and on this topic there hundreds of articles, mostly with a different point of view than that expressed by Field and Wroe.