Megafaunal Extinction – Still Unsolved
Many scientists have been attempting to find an underlying cause for the demise of large mammals at the end of the last Ice Age. And they will still keep trying, because they aren’t thinking outside of the box. Today’s news has a scientist coming up with three different reasons for three species – I can’t see why this was even published…
Results of the analysis, which appear online today in Nature, “were quite surprising,” Willerslev says. “The extinctions seemed to be a random process.”
How is that a result? It basically says we don’t know. Those many species didn’t all die out at the same time due to random processes!
Conclusions from the study:
- Humans did not cause the demise of woolly rhinos
- Humans did not cause the demise of musk oxen
- Humans (and climate change) did cause the demise of the steppe bison
- “The team wasn’t able to determine the cause or causes of extinction for the woolly mammoth”
The news release ends with an admission that it is still very much a mystery (unless you believe in global cataclysms…):
After all, each of these species, including those that went extinct at the end of the last ice age, had experienced similar if not larger climate fluctuations during previous ice ages. “Why, in this case, did they go all the way to extinction?” he asks. “It’s an intellectually interesting problem.”
