Nullarbor trove solves megafauna murder mystery (Leigh Dayton, The Australian, January 25th, 2007)
Scientists now claim it was not climate change but Aborigines who were to blame for killing off the giant kangaroos, birds and marsupial lions that once roamed the country.
Scientists led by paleontologist Gavin Prideaux reported overnight in the journal Nature that the new-found fossils disproved claims that climate change triggered the extinction of the "megafauna" about 46,000 years ago.
"There's no way you can twist the evidence to say that climate change was responsible," said Dr Prideaux, Rio Tinto Research Fellow at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, of the demise of 90 per cent of the continent's big beasts.
That leaves only one suspect: Homo sapiens.
Researchers such as Tim Flannery have long supported the "blitzkrieg" hypothesis proposed by US geoscientist Paul Martin that when people first arrived in a new land they hunted their prey to extinction. Others suggested that Aboriginal people not only hunted megafauna, they fired the landscape, changing the ecosystem and stressing the animals to breaking point. Among the missing are claw-footed kangaroos, Sthenurines, that weighed in at 300kg, the enormous 100kg Genyornis, the heaviest bird ever known, and the leopard-sized marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex. Dr Prideaux and his colleagues reported details of their paleontological, ecological and geochemical analysis of 400,000-800,000-year-old remains unearthed in the Thylacoleo Caves of southeastern Australia.
According to Dr Prideaux, the site is a "Rosetta stone" of complete skeletons, many, like the marsupial lion, previously known only in fragments.
The site also shed light on climate conditions prior to the arrival of people, 40,000-60,000 years ago.
The team claimed they had conclusive evidence that before people arrived, animals survived climate swings.
"They were coping very well, thank you very much," said team member Bert Roberts, a dating expert at NSW's University of Wollongong.
There are several reasons why free citizens should maintain a healthy scepticism about the torrents of scientific “discoveries” that descend on us daily. Most of it is as inaccessible to the layman as the Bible was to medieval Catholic peasants, and the scientific establishment seems more than happy to sow(:-))general doubt in our intellectual self-confidence and to convince us they and only they hold the key to timeless Truth, even about ourselves. But an equally important reason is how the very nature of scientific inquiry leads its practitioners to believe they are untouched by the human limitations and prejudices that colour our understanding of the world around us. Their attraction to the politically popular and correct seems so palpable at times that one wonders whether our greatest modern self-delusion is that politics follows science rather than the other way around.
For several generations now, received wisdom in progressive circles has been that aboriginal man lived in harmony with his natural surroundings and was fully integrated into the circle of life around him. The seasons came and went, but the interdependence of life and that old-time pagan wisdom ensured a timeless balance that was quickly re-established when anything got even slightly out of hand. It was only when Western man showed up with his destructive toys seeking God, glory and gold that things went out of biological whack–especially when he introduced that new-fangled private property. Aboriginal political leaders have dined out repeatedly at well-set tables with the high and mighty on this improbable story, and it has undergirded a lot of destructive policies that have contributed to corruption and unspeakable pathologies in native communities, but it has to be understood as a corrective reaction to previous myths grounded in contempt, racism and marginalization that were even more destructive.
Now, on the basis of one fossil-trove discovery, aboriginal man may have lost his ecological innocence and moral free pass. The new thinking seems to be that before he arrived, all manner of wild beasties lived in self-regulating harmony and took their ice ages like..err...men. Then comes aboriginal man, fresh from parts unknown, who celebrates his arrival by a wanton, irrational spree of burning, killing and Lord knows what else. Selfish beyond words and caring nothing for the natural cycles of his new home, he turns into a one-species swath of destruction. Soon, no more leopard-sized marsupial lions. The horror! No wonder he got the boot from East Africa.
Given the rapidly growing nihilist, anti-human ethos of the modern environmental movement and the sorry history of our relations with aboriginal peoples, we think we’ll hold with the first myth for the time being.
9 comments:
We know who the real villains are in Australia.
The penultimate sentence is a masterpiece of PC. Ebony-hued people can never be blamed for anything no way, no how. How different would this article be if the people allegedly responsible for the slaughter of innocent animals were white Europeans.
Not to excuse or condone the way Europeans treated aborigines whether in Africa, Australia or the Americas, they really didn't look upon them as human beings like themselves. Perhaps even no differently than the Maoris looked upon the fantastic animals whose remains were found on the Nullarbor Plain.
Perhaps it's just a result of the popularizers, but the human based extinction theory for megafauna is decades old, at least. It's certainly been taken very seriously for as long as I have dabbled in the subject.
You might look at the book 1491, which has as its thesis that the Native Americans shaped much of the ecology of the Americas, treating the whole thing as basically their garden, that much of what we now think of as its "natural state" was actually anthropogenic.
"Ebony-hued people can never be blamed for anything no way, no how" is a 20th century zeitgeist, and it stems directly from the fact that most nations run by ebony-hued peoples are utter failures, compared to those run by white-, tan-, or yellow-hued peoples.
Basically, it's a "don't kick 'em while they're down" reaction.
Per SH, there is a plateau in (IIRC, Southern Canada) with a several hundred foot cliff along one side.
At one time, the indigenous Americans, stewards of the environment that they were, would stampede whole herds of Buffalo over the cliff.
Which had the convenient outcome of making your prey self-killing.
Unfortunately, thousands more animals than they needed, or could possibly use, were wasted.
O - My comment about ebony-hued people refers to the PC about regular folk, not about rulers. In other words, I was being sarcastic.
Hawaii was, unsurprisingly, home to a variety of flightless geese, ibises and so on (and thornless raspberries), which are all gone, except the raspberries.
This happened recently enough that alternatives to the cooking pot are not seriously entertained.
No reason, therefore, to doubt that humans on bigger stages would have behaved the same way.
Curiously, the mystery for Hawaii is not who but when. The coming of the humans is not agreed very precisely but was perhaps around 300 AD, give or take a few centuries.
The humans also nearly exterminated the dominant shrub of the coastal areas. For generations, the palynologists found huge amounts of pollen wherever they dug, but it matched no known plant.
About 15 years ago, a biologist, dangling on a rope over a sea stack separated from a larger island by a few yards discovered two individuals of the plant that had left the pollen.
Fire and agriculture probably accounted for its elimination elsewhere.
Although some of the assertive Native Hawaiians would like to position themselves as living in sacred harmony with the 'aina (land) in a way that whites cannot do, they really cannot dispute the aboriginal destruction, which puts them in an interesting position compared with other noble savages.
I bet that the trendy whites like to say "aina".
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