Thursday, May 11, 2006
What Killed the Horses and Mammoths in North America?
There has been an ongoing intellectual battle among paleontologist about what caused the large animal extinction at the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. The choices are overkill (human hunting caused the extinction) and climate (forests grew where there were grasslands and the grass eaters died off). I'm firmly in the overkill camp. There is a story on the climate theory today at the Washington Post. Why would the wrong theory be pushed in the paper? Is it to make the thought of climate change now seem more scary?
Here's my proof. It wasn't just one ice age and one melting; it was a series of at least 20 during the Pleistocene (the last 2.5 million years) Growing glaciers, shrinking glaciers and a warm interglacial--at first the cycle took 40,000 years but lately it's been taking about 100,000. How did the large mammals survive the first 19 dramatic climate changes? What was different about the last? The answer is obvious, the difference was there were organized human hunters during the last. QED
Here's my proof. It wasn't just one ice age and one melting; it was a series of at least 20 during the Pleistocene (the last 2.5 million years) Growing glaciers, shrinking glaciers and a warm interglacial--at first the cycle took 40,000 years but lately it's been taking about 100,000. How did the large mammals survive the first 19 dramatic climate changes? What was different about the last? The answer is obvious, the difference was there were organized human hunters during the last. QED
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 8:35 AM 
