It wasn’t a paleo-blitzkrieg
I found this National Geographic link at Instapundit. A number of archeologists have accused the paleo-Indians of a “blitzkrieg” assault on North American mega-fauna (like mammoths). This theory fits in well with the “people are the problem” environmentalist crowd.
THe article focuses on the work of Dal Gutherie. Key excerpt:
“It seems we need to shift our emphasis from hunters merely riding down the extinct Pleistocene faunas, to a vision of them coming in on a rising tide of the species that did not become extinct,” such as bison and elks, he said. The Pleistocene epoch occurred between about 1.8 million and 10,500 years ago.
Overlap
In the new study Guthrie notes that there is thousand-year gap between when people showed up and when mammoths died off.
This gulf indicates that humans “could well have had a hand in the gradual extinction of mammoths, but not as in a century-scale ‘blitzkrieg’ overkill, in which a newly arriving wave of superefficient human hunters broadly and abruptly devastated local megafaunas,” he said.
Gary Haynes is an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, and president of the International Union for Quaternary Research’s Commission on Palaeoecology and Human Evolution.
Haynes says Guthrie’s work is important for understanding the transition from glacial to interglacial conditions and the ecological circumstances of human arrival to the Americas.
Gutherie says he is not out to debunk the human “overkill” hypothesis. He suggests human beings played a peripheral role in the mammoths and paleo-horses extinction in North America. Climate change reduced the species and human hunters may have helped finish them off. (He argues that North American camels and mastodons were extinct before the aggressive human hunting bands showed up.)
Read the entire article.
UPDATE: An angry would-be commenter whose comment was rejected by the spam filter wrote me via email. I’ll do this once, against my better judgment.
Mr. Bay, the problem you present has a basic fallacy. As any right thinking person knows it is White European Males that are the cause of the world’s problems. The indigenous American population can not be faulted as part of the “man is the problem” school. One need only watch “Dances With Wolves” to fully comprehend this fact. Since White European Males were not on the North American continent at the time of the die off of the species in question, it is intuitively obvious that man was not the cause.
Where are the “re-education camps” when you need them? In the true sense of fraternal socialism.
Yes, we are trying to correct the problem with the spam filter.
