People, mammoths, sabre-tooths etc.

smallfish

New Member
So for years it was assumed that people arrived in America in about 10,000 BC and mammoths etc died out very soon after so people get the blame. But there is another school of thought that is considered legitimate, that America was peopled during a lull in the last ice age, about 20,000 BC, give or take a few millenia.
So if people arrived in 20,000 BC and lived alongside mammoths, sabretooths etc for 10,000 years can they be blamed for causing the extinctions?
 
So for years it was assumed that people arrived in America in about 10,000 BC and mammoths etc died out very soon after so people get the blame. But there is another school of thought that is considered legitimate, that America was peopled during a lull in the last ice age, about 20,000 BC, give or take a few millenia.
So if people arrived in 20,000 BC and lived alongside mammoths, sabretooths etc for 10,000 years can they be blamed for causing the extinctions?

Assuming they co-inhabited the region at the same time I would doubt that there is any chance they would have caused the extinctions as they simply did not have the population or capacity to kill in the numbers required to bring about extinction.
 
Well frankly yes they can. Back in those days there was very little consideration for sustainability. It was all to survive. It is very possible that as the human population grew they overhunted the mammoths and that's why they died out. Makes perfect sense to me.
 
There wasn't a need to hunt them into extinction. Simply the humans of yesteryear could've eliminated or reduced their food supplies, which in turn would bring about a deterioration in the races and lead to a decline, add hunting and it could take a few thousand years but would be possible.
 
I don't buy this. Indigenous peoples in various parts of the world never hunted their own food supply to extinction because they were in balance with their habitats. Why would native Americans be any different? I mean, it was only until white men came to America in the 17th and 18th Century that Bison began to be hunted almost to extinction. Native Americans had coexisted beside buffalo for thousands of years without affecting their numbers.

No, there had to be something more momentous that caused the extinctions, an impact event like the Younger Dryas event:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_event
 
I don't buy this. Indigenous peoples in various parts of the world never hunted their own food supply to extinction because they were in balance with their habitats. Why would native Americans be any different? I mean, it was only until white men came to America in the 17th and 18th Century that Bison began to be hunted almost to extinction. Native Americans had coexisted beside buffalo for thousands of years without affecting their numbers.

No, there had to be something more momentous that caused the extinctions, an impact event like the Younger Dryas event:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_event

I agree with you that people never intend to to hunt species into extinction, but there is always the law of unintended consequences.

Mankind has an ability to adapt itself to the land, at the same time we adapt the land to suit our needs. This does have an effect on the "natural cycle" of nature. We take the land that the animal used to graze / feed upon, then it needs to find new land, as do we because we spread far and wide! Thus begins the cycle.
 
I don't buy this. Indigenous peoples in various parts of the world never hunted their own food supply to extinction because they were in balance with their habitats. Why would native Americans be any different? I mean, it was only until white men came to America in the 17th and 18th Century that Bison began to be hunted almost to extinction. Native Americans had coexisted beside buffalo for thousands of years without affecting their numbers.

No, there had to be something more momentous that caused the extinctions, an impact event like the Younger Dryas event:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_event

Yet look at the Dodo. Admmittably it was with a later group of Spaniards however they just drove the bird to exteinction. It is the same in Australia with non-flying birds being nearly driven to extinction because they're just easy to kill. I would still stand by the fact that the human race would drive it's food supply to extinction
 
Ground effects of the Younger Dryas impacts.

The likelihood of the observations of an amateur being taken seriously by the academic community are inversely proportional to the significance of those observations. So that a really big idea that changes things has about as much chance of being heard as a mouse breaking wind in a hurricane.

But the causes of the Mega-faunal extinctions of the Younger Dryas don't need to be such a mystery. The Younger Dryas impact events sterilized half the continent, compromised the food chain of the other half, and the rest of the northern hemisphere as well. The species that survived were the adaptable ones. And the ones that didn't need so much to eat.

The blast effected materials of the event are clear, and obvious, in high res satellite images. But the academic community is in denial. Because those blast effected materials fly in the face of almost all of the untested assumptions of standard, gradualist landform theory. And they are destined to change almost all of standard impact science as well. There is nothing in it for the creation myths though. Because the true story the actual motions of those blast effected materials tells makes the most frightening biblical disaster, or catastrophe, sound like a children's fairy tale by comparison.

The truth is that our planet is orbiting in the same shooting gallery as the rest of the planets. And our atmosphere is about as much protection as a silk nighty in a firefight. The most violent natural disaster in 65 million years was only a few thousand years ago. And except for a few prospectors looking for money rocks its blast effected materials are almost completely unstudied.

I never thought such skills would ever have a civilian application. But those in this group who have a handle on doing blast analysis, and bomb damage assessment from aerial surveillance photos will take to this like a duck takes to water. Because the motions, and fluid mechanics of the actual blast effected materials of the YD impacts are as easy to read as following spilled paint back to the can. http://sites.google.com/site/dragonstormproject/Home
 
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I don't buy this. Indigenous peoples in various parts of the world never hunted their own food supply to extinction because they were in balance with their habitats. Why would native Americans be any different? I mean, it was only until white men came to America in the 17th and 18th Century that Bison began to be hunted almost to extinction. Native Americans had coexisted beside buffalo for thousands of years without affecting their numbers.

They weren't indigenous or native american at this point, they were new comers who had lived starving in siberia for too long. The way they would hunt was they would drive whole herds towards cliffs and have them plunge to their deaths. Because whole herds died their numbers couldn't replenish.

I would still stand by the fact that the human race would drive it's food supply to extinction

Impossible. We no longer hunt animals, we farm them. Driving our cows to extinction is like having wheat go extinct.
 
They weren't indigenous or native american at this point, they were new comers who had lived starving in siberia for too long. The way they would hunt was they would drive whole herds towards cliffs and have them plunge to their deaths. Because whole herds died their numbers couldn't replenish.


I was under the impression that Clovis Indians were now thought to be Western European and not Siberian due to similarities between Clovis and Solutrean technology.
 
I was under the impression that Clovis Indians were now thought to be Western European and not Siberian due to similarities between Clovis and Solutrean technology.

That is a hypothesis however major migration is still attributed via the Bering land bridge from Siberia. The only evidence in the Solutrean hypothesis is the similar method of flint tool making however this would not be the first time in history that similar methods have arose in different civilisations.
 
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