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Post by mingle on Aug 12, 2008 14:57:10 GMT 10
Hi All, Been a bit quiet on here of late... So here's a news story to perk things up a bit: www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24166709-421,00.html Cheers, Mike. |
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Post by youcantry on Aug 12, 2008 15:25:25 GMT 10
Yep. And extinction's only accelerating..
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Post by mingle on Aug 12, 2008 15:47:50 GMT 10
I know... What we really need is a nice fat asteroid to wipe out the pesky human race - or better still a plague to clear us out and leave the rest of the species to get on with it... I'm only half joking too!  Cheers, Mike. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 13, 2008 6:21:00 GMT 10
First Australians behind early extinctions
www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24166709-421,00.html
PREHISTORIC animals were hunted into extinction by the very first Australians and climate change would not have killed them, a group of prominent researchers claim.
Research released today says the first Australians shared Tasmania with megafauna more than 40,000 years ago, disputing previous research that suggested that the giant animals were already extinct before humans arrived.
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Study author Richard Roberts from the University of Wollongong said the extinctions of the Simosthenurus (big kangaroo), the Thylacoleo (marsupial lion) and the Zygomaturus (giant
wombat) were believed to have occurred shortly after humans arrived on the island.
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The new research was published in the latest edition of US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Thanks Mingle. I had a good look round PNAS but can't seem to find the paper. You wouldn't know it's exact cite, perchance? QfT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 13, 2008 6:25:52 GMT 10
I know... What we really need is a nice fat asteroid to wipe out the pesky human race - or better still a plague to clear us out and leave the rest of the species to get on with it... I'm only half joking too! Cheers, Mike. Heh, well, according to this article, an asteroid/comet is suggested as the cause of the Younger Dryas event and extinction of northern hemisphere megafauna. It might have done them in but apparently humans may have just shrugged it off ... Buchanan, B., M. Collard, et al. "Paleoindian demography and the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: -.
Recently it has been suggested that one or more large extraterrestrial (ET) objects struck northern North America 12,900 ± 100 calendar years before present (calBP) [Firestone RB, (2007) 104: 16016–16021]. This impact is claimed to have triggered the Younger Dryas major cooling event and resulted in the extinction of the North American megafauna. The impact is also claimed to have caused major cultural changes and population decline among the Paleoindians. Here, we report a study in which ≈1,500 radiocarbon dates from archaeological sites in Canada and the United States were used to test the hypothesis that the ET resulted in population decline among the Paleoindians. Following recent studies [e.g., Gamble C, Davies W, Pettitt P, Hazelwood L, Richards M (2005) 15:193–223), the summed probability distribution of the calibrated dates was used to identify probable changes in human population size between 15,000 and 9,000 calBP. Subsequently, potential biases were evaluated by modeling and spatial analysis of the dated occupations. The results of the analyses were not consistent with the predictions of extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. No evidence of a population decline among the Paleoindians at 12,900 ± 100 calBP was found. Thus, minimally, the study suggests the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis should be amended.
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