The Overseer said:
I suggest you read "Guns, germs and steel" to get a good introduction to the subject).
I actually own that book, together with his second book 'Downfall'. Jared Diamond is a pretty good writer, with some pretty good opinions, but I wouldn't take all he says as the absolute truth. Sometimes he overthinks things to a great degree, other times he focusses so strongly on one part of the puzzle that he seems oblivious to all the rest, and his trains of thought ofter take him way too far.
Still, an intelligent man.
But you're wrong. The tuberculosis is actually the most speculative of the three.
I don't know where you got that from, but from my uni lessons I distinctively remember my professor discussing the general consensus on this matter. Even though that's three years ago now, I clearly remember this (it was one of the first classes in that course), but of course it might be possible he wasn't speaking the absolute truth.
They died out because the climate got warmer. But it had absolutely nothing to do with heat. The entire ecology of the planet changed, including the food sources and their availability. The mammoth had its way of life, and its way of migration. As this was upset, they couldn't survive.
Yeah, the fact that the climate changed had a lot to do with their extinction too. It wasn't that they couldn't stand the heat, it was that they had to start sharing their habitat with all kinds of species that did not venture outside of the temperate regions before, and proved more succesfull in finding food then they were - leaving less for them. Which is kinda what I wrote, I think.
Polar bears dying from heat isn't the problem, Jebus. It's the fact that with the polar ice caps melting away, their natural habitat is destroyed. To take it to the extreme, a polar bear wouldn't survive more than a week in a jungle.
It's actually more simple than that. It's not that they couldn't survive if they had to live on solid ground, it's the fact that they simply drown when their territory melts away.
And not because of the heat, simply because it wouldn't know how to survive. The climate 10,000 years ago was improving for us, but not for the mammoth that had evolved during thousands of years of ice age.
Again, it's not that they wouldn't know how to survive in a more temperate climate. Less ice = more food, and that's the same for the mammoth. The problem lay in the fact that as long as they lived in snowy regions they only had to share their habitat with, say, bisons, but when the ice started melting there suddenly were thousands more species there. Eating away the good food before they got to it, and bringing all kinds of germs and diseases with them the mammoth was not familiar with (causing the aforementioned epidemic). (and concerning that last point, 'guns, germs and steel' ought to have given you a clue)
Same thing for any species, really. The dinosaurs didn't die out from a meteorite impact. The idea that a single impact would create a thermic shockwave covering the entire planet burning everything in its path is ridiculous. The dinosaurs died out because of the sudden climate change brought on by the impact. They didn't die out right away, it took thousands, if not millions of years after that for the last true "dinosaur" to die out. And still, they live on. A few managed to adapt and become the birds we know today. Ever heard of terror birds? If not, I would suggest you read up on it. It tells a lot about what happened to the few dinosauroid species that made it.
You're kinda preaching to the choir here, dude. This is pretty much the point
I was making...
As for overhunting, it has nothing to do with the amount of humans. It has to do with how adapted the hunted species are to being hunted by humans. As an example, let's take the large marsupial fauna of Australia, circa 40,000 years ago. They had spent many millions of years evolving on a continent completely devoid of humans, creating a delicate balance of hunter/hunted species. Then the humans arrived. The animals hadn't learned to fear humans, nor did they even perceive them as a threat. Result: within a few thousand years all large animals had completely died out (this is actually why native Australians never developed advanced viviculture and hence civilizations. It's still not proven that humans were the cause of this, but logic and a little reasoning will show you that they had a lot to do with it. Another more recent example is the dodo bird, or, if you doubt that, watch the next National geographic documentary about Antarctica. You'll see that animals living on that continent, having evolved completely oblivious to the existence of humans, will approach explorers fearlessly. If those explorers had been early settlers, the penguins would've died out a long time ago.
You have to understand that back then, there was little understanding of ecological balance and such. It was hard enough hunting down most animals to feed your group. The mammoths presented themselves as an easy target, a buffet if you will. Early humans just took that opportunity. Same thing happened to the mastodont in North America (although that could be different, they might've disappeared before settlers arrived, I'm not sure). The mammoth hadn't evolved alongside humans. When they were spreading over Eurasia, the humans had barely made it out of Africa (actually, many say homo erectus had already populated most of Eurasia, but this is again speculative).
Homo Sapiens had reached most of the world by 30 000 BC; the first ice age ended around 15 000 BC; the mammoth got (mostly) extinct by 5000 BC. (IIRC)
25 000 years is a heck of a long time to adapt to humans.
Climate change which lead to habitat destruction and the disappearance of food resources (the mammoths were, unlike elephants, grazers. The climate getting warmer allowed more forests to appear, which replaced large, grassy steppes)
Well, to be fair, that's only the Wooly mammoth. IIRC, you had different species of mammoth who evolved (and survived) in the forests of Africa and South America.
Again, I have the feeling we're both saying the same thing here. They lost the evolutionary race. The other species that started appearing and sharing their habitat were simply better at surviving.
coupled with intense hunting by early humans, the destruction of habitat caused by human settling led to mammoths disappearing.
Again, you are greatly overestimating the amount, capabilities and hunger of +/- 15 000 BC humans.
That's why trying to resurrect it won't work. Not only is its home completely changed, save for the Siberian steppes, but it wouldn't be able to cope with humans occupying most of the planet's surface.
I was never really debating that point - but anyway, it seems obvious to me that the scientists planning this probably aren't going to try and repopulate the world with them - more likely they'd end up in zoos and nature reserves.
My personal opinion is that in the case of the mammoth, the reason for it's extinction is actually fairly simple: it's simply way too big of a herbivorous beast to survive in colder climates. No way they could ever get enough food to sustain themselves...
So you're saying that an animal that spent the last few million years on evolutionary perfection migrating back and forth in a rough, extremely cold climate couldn't cope with winter? This almost looks like a troll...
[/quote]
No, you're reading me wrong. What I meant to say was that they couldn't possibly find enough sustenance when competing with other, smaller species. And this is what happened, really: due to climatoligical and (especially) more basic evolutionary reasons more and more species started to appear.
I wouldn't see the purpose of trolling, really. We're mostly saying the same things, only our empasis seems to be different.
