“I would expect hunter-gatherers entering uninhabited America to have done pretty well, and have high population growth rates, especially after they become more familiar with the local ecology. There is good reason to think that early Amerindians did: Bayesian skyline analysis of their mtDNA indicates fast population growth. They were expert hunters before they ever arrived, and once they got rolling, they seem to have wiped out the megafauna quite rapidly.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/threading-the-needle/
When the early trans-Siberians
arrived, the North Americas contained few bison. The newcomers, experienced in
killing big herbivores and carnivores, extinguished competitors and predators,
leaving millions of acres of nutritious plains grass for the bison. By
eliminating native species, the now-Native Americans provided the basis for
their own expansion. They were, in modern terminology, colonials.
Haven't read the link yet. I just always have a hard time believing that people with pointed sticks could wipe out a species. (unless that species was already teetering).
ReplyDeleteMW: Mastodons disappeared from North America around 10,000 years ago, said Ross MacPhee, of the Richard Gilder Graduate School. By that time, “whatever the mastodon population was down to, their range had shrunken mostly to the Great Lakes region. That’s a very different scenario from saying the human depredations caused universal loss of mastodons across their entire range within the space of a few hundred years, which is the conventional view.” Easy to find are articles claiming “climate change” caused extinction, but those pick and choose “scientific facts” to back accusations.
ReplyDelete“Man did it” was an early indictment, 50-plus years ago, before the learned world settled on climate change as the greatest evil Earth has ever suffered. Laying blame on Stone Age hunters was easy, since there was nothing else to blame. Like you, I thought there was no way man could hunt mastodon to extinction. It is plausible, though, that when the big animals were all dead, American bison would benefit. Like everybody else, I don’t know.
At one time, “the science” had decided that 10,000 years ago was the earliest possible date for man’s arrival in the Americas.
Comment at Legal Insurrection on DNA and a green Greenland:
ReplyDelete“If you think Whitey is bad, just look at what the Native Americans did to the Great lakes region over the last 10-12000 years. They killed all the mammoths whose farts were keeping the planet warm.” – Major Wood.