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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 มิ.ย. 2024
- Ever wonder how the megafauna, like woolly mammoths, saber toothed cats, giant ground sloths, giant armadillos, and others, went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, ~11,000 years ago? In this video, we go over all the all the most notable megafauna of the Pleistocene, how they evolved, and how they went extinct, or at least the various hypotheses about how they went extinct, from asteroid to human hunting! Enjoy :D
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0:00 What were the megafauna?
1:32 The Pleistocene Ice Age
3:07 The Younger Dryas Cooling
3:45 Megafauna Extinctions
4:23 Notable Megafauna
6:17 Mammoths & Mastodons
11:33 Saber Toothed Cats
13:24 Giant Ground Sloths
13:54 Giant Armadillos
15:37 Giant Short Faced Bears
16:23 Woolly Rhinos
18:32 Dire Wolves
18:50 What caused megafauna extinctions?
22:05 What caused the Younger Dryas Cooling?
22:51 Fun Dino game!
References:
Rethinking megafauna: royalsocietypublishing.org/do...
Late survival of megafauna refuted for Cloggs Cave, SE Australia: Implications for the Australian Late Pleistocene megafauna extinction debate: www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Relationships between climate change, human environmental impact, and megafaunal extinction: www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Environmental drivers of megafauna and hominin extinction: www.nature.com/articles/s4158...
Mammoths and Mastodons - Ancient Extinct Elephants: www.thoughtco.com/mammoths-an...
50 Million Years of Elephant Evolution: www.thoughtco.com/50-million-....
Earth System History: amzn.to/3v1Iy0G
GEO GIRL Website: www.geogirlscience.com/ (visit my website to see all my courses, shop merch, learn more about me, & donate to support the channel if you'd like!)
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I hope you enjoyed the video!
You can support the Dino Survival Kickstarter here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/davidgamemaker/dino-survival?
And you can check out the Dino Survival website here: dino-survival.com/products/dino-survival-card-game?
those are danish words, so the r in Allerød is a deep raspy throat sound, and ø is like _fur._
That looks like a cool game! It scratches two itches: games & dinosaurs. I've been looking for a more adult version of a dinosaur game for awhile... the current ones are more like "help your dino get off the island before the volcano blows, ages 4-6".
Dire Wolf is also a Grateful Dead song and a monster in D&D.
I have to say there are some serious issues with the video in terms of accuracy, and it’s incredibly frustrating because you’ve ended up spreading some common but harmful misconceptions around. To boot:
- “competition with modern animals” flat-out doesn’t work as a cause of extinction for the megafauna, because the “modern” animals were NOT newly evolved competitors. Most living animals had already evolved by the Late Pleistocene, BEFORE any of these extinctions happened. In other words, extinct Pleistocene megafauna couldn’t have been outcompeted by modern animals because they WERE among said modern animals (evolutionarily and ecologically).
- you’re trying to describe all Pleistocene megafauna as being cold-adapted, when a lot of them weren’t (basically everything that was reliant on forested settings like Smilodon or mastodons, most ground sloths, etc), and still other basically didn’t care (Arctodus, etc). This has MASSIVE implications for why they went extinct, since any sort of climate-driven extinction would have only harmed one set of megafauna and benefitted the other set more suited for the new conditions.
- The Younger Dryas was NOT a one-off climate cataclysm. Similar climatic fluctuations happened during the early stages of all previous interglacials. And yes, previous interglacials existed throughout the Late Pleistocene-the “ice age” was NOT a continuous glacial period. Since the megafauna survived all those changes (and tying into the above, each change only harmed one set of megafaunal species while benefitting the other set due to different climate and habitat requirements), that further reduces the role climate could have played in megafaunal extinctions.
To sum it all up-the only possible cause that actually fits the overall data is some sort of human impact, whether it be hunting, spread of diseases or habitat destruction.
@@bkjeong4302 It is completely implausible that humans drove 30+ continenal genera to extinction. Humans have driven island species to extinction, but never managed it on a continental scale. Humans were in North America for many thousands of years before the event. I am surprised and disappointed to find anybody still promoting that old saw. The only animals for which a human cause can be plausible is the mammoth, as we know happened much later when Inuit reached Wrangel Island.
What we know happened at the right time was the comet strike, coincident with the start of the Younger Dryas. Nobody knows what was its role in triggering the YD, if any, and might not for a long time. But that it caused continent-wide wildfires is no longer in question, supported by spikes in platinum concentration and ammonia from dozens of sites in North America and in Greenland and Antarctic ice cores. Failing to mention the comet strike is a big disappointment, that could be fixed in a subsequent video. See particularly papers by Wendy Wolbach and James Kennet. Martin Sweatman wrote a good survey article in (I think) 2019.
Definitely one of my favorite subjects by far that you’ve covered. Something that I also know a great deal about as well, especially when it comes to the bizarre and magnificent Megafauna.
Smilo! I was hoping you'd see this one, I thought of you when I was going over the Smilodon part! ;D
@@GEOGIRL Yes of course, the best way to catch my attention!! So nice to know I crossed your mind during the Smilodon part. :D And don’t worry, I’ve still been watching all your other videos, even though I haven’t been commenting as often as I used to. ;)
Rachel: The Rancho La Brea tar pit fauna holds a veritable treasure trove of data on Pleistocene megafauna and pollen. I know several west coast universities are actively pursuing the extinction problem based on this data. When I was a student at UC Berkeley I had access to the then department of paleontology’s massive vertebrate mammal collection. It was extraordinary and a sight to behold.
Dinosaurs have always been my first and foremost interest, but the Pleistocene Megafauna is right behind them in total badassery.
Pleistocene megafauna need to be recreated as plushies. Everyone wants to cuddle with a wooly rhino plushie, right? And how adorable would a glyptodon plushie be?
I found your channel a couple of years ago and I found it fun. Also I have to point out that you forgot the American Lion.
Hi Rachel,
Thank you so much for featuring my game and your feedback! I hope your viewers enjoy it and that I get to make expansions for it.
Hi! I backed it. I've been looking for dinosaur games which aren't geared for small children or have some kind of silly theme (like a dino version of a war game or something) but one which is made for people who think dinosaurs are cool & want to learn more. Fingers crossed, you get to make the expansions. 🦖🦕
Glad to have you back, greetings from Mexico
Good point about how humans affect megafauna is more than just hunting. Humans cause many changes in environments that also can lead to extinction along with hunting.
Awesome! Also Australia has some really unique megafauna such as giant ziphodont terrestrial land dwelling crocodiles that could gallop, and armored horned land turtles, and other cool species as well.
I find these megafauna especially interesting. New to your channel. Thanks
Thanks Rachel. Hope the paper writing went well! Looking forward to next video on the YD. Lots of silly theories bout that.
Great thanks dr geo girl excellent video
Great video doctor Phillips ❤
Hi, I really love your work and always enjoy your videos. One small critique of this video however is that you don't point out that you are focusing on the megafauna extinction that occurred in the Americas and, to a lesser extent, in Serbia which was connected to North America by the Bering Land Bridge. A similar megafauna extinction occurred 40,000 years ago in Australia, also coincidental with the arrival of humans on the continent. Interestingly, African megafauna survived into the present age, on the continent where humans evolved. The continuing human caused mass extinction event however may overwhelm these majestic creatures in time as well.
Hey, I'm here! 👋 I'm 197 cm at 95 kg - Megafauna is here 😅
Your a funny large guy.
As for the relatively large presence of dire wolves in fiction, my guess is that it came from the popularity of La Brea tar pits as a tourist destination. It's certainly much older than Game of Thrones.
Probably actually? Maybe..? It's a D&D thing- I remember fighting Dire Wolves in Baldur's Gate 2 back in 2000, but considering how many video games and movies were influenced by California (and Texas) geographies, including the La Brea Tar pit smack dab in the middle of downtown LA. Sure.
I can imagine Gary Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were imagining their war-fantasy game while they were lost in browsing California's tar pit-
The megafauna went extinct but some of the fruits that depended on them for survival and seed dispersal (such as mango and avocado) survived thanks to us hungry/crafty humans.
Howdy Doc. Thanks for your enjoyable video. Looking forward to seeing your insights into the Younger Dryas, which sounds like it was more impactful than the Older Dryas. I think Dryas was an Arctic Tundra flowering plant.
Prehistoric megafauna and everything else that was around during that era is some of my favorite moments in all of earth's timeline. The amount of different types of animals is crazy! We all know the most popular but there are so many different species with in these different animal groups. For example there was so many different types of saber toothed cats, big cats, giant Mustalids, crazy kinds of marsupials, giant kamodo dragon type lizards, the list goes on and on. The biodiversity was so complex and impressive back then. It's a dream to imagine what those habitats and ecosystems must have been like.
One thing I've never gotten about the human over-hunting caused extinctions, is the fact that horses and camels that crossed the Bering Straight going west into Asia where human already existed and would have hunted them thrived, and did not go extinct like North America. What would account for that?
Great vid GG. I hope Texas adopts the Glyptodon as the official state prehistoric critter.
What about the giant wombats? There was also a giant platypus 5-15MYA but it had teeth so even weirder than the modern ones.
Megatherium was always one of my favorites. Just because it's a cool name, heard it was a giant ground sloth later.
Megafauna from around the world. Today there are North American Bison, there was a buffalo species as well as giant Bison species nearly 3 meters to the shoulder in the Pleistocene. Giant armadillos, and giant ground sloths. Giant deer in Europe (Megaceros) and in India a 4-ton tortoise that lived in the Decan Peninsula, Smilodon fatalis, but multiple other saber-tooth tiger and cat species. Many other giant species, 17-foot iguana in Equatorial West Africa, even giant beavers, a 1,500 pound (650 kg) giant Antigua Rat in the Caribbean and so forth.
Hi Geo-Girl 😊, this is my most favorite extinction-debate that I follow. I tend to favor the impact theory, but I'm open to all ideas. I've seen the two NOVA presentations plus a number of other papers, articles, and presentations. Not only does all this hint at what may be the cause, to me it shows some psychological insight as to how researchers think through what happened. I may have mentioned that back in January, the Natural History Society of Maryland acquired a Alaskan Mammoth, estimated to be some 40 million years old.
I also find the impact theory so interesting! I watched the NOVA series on it too and have now read many papers (in prep for the YDIH video that will come week after next) and it is so back and forth depending on whose paper you read haha! I mean, I don't think we have a clear consensus yet, but it is certainly something I can't wait to see more future research on :D
Hi Rachel 🚵, I'm back on the elliptical watching 👀 you. Thank you very much for this very interesting video!
Australian megafauna was not at large as in other places, but I am not sure I would have liked to meet a group of 800lb wombats if they were in a bad mood.
Red Kangaroos and Cassowaries are classified as megafauna, and are still around today. Both very dangerous when annoyed.
Large male Diprotodons were the size of a female asian elephant, would still rank in the top 5 of largest land animal if they survived (but mastodon, giant sloths and gomphotheres didn't)
@@miquelescribanoivars5049 perhaps they tasted quite nice when flame grilled...?!!
I believe I found a piece of armor from a giant armadillo
Found it while rock hunting in Arkansas.
I could share a picture of it if you are interested in taking a look.
I like collecting what I believe are meteorites.
Been watching a TH-camr who explores the southwest native american cliff dwelling sites -- we always thing about other hostile human tribes being predatory -- however maybe megafauna bears, wolves and cats should also be considered -- I am sure some archo-geologist have documented what animal bones are found in common with these ancient human dwellings' Maybe? Good job Doc!!!
th-cam.com/video/tgPyF2eBzxM/w-d-xo.html
The dire wolves in 'Game of Thrones' look like big wolves, whereas real dire wolves, iirc, were reddish in colour and had differently shaped heads. Four of those fictional dire wolves behave like dogs but two exhibit wolf-like behaviours.
Great video! And any viewers that have not visited the Mammoth Site really should see it. 😎🔥🙌
Yes! Both of them :D
Notoungulata means "southern hoofed animals". They're very distantly related to the Perissodactyls: horses and rhinos.
THat's the question: Where did these giant cuties go to?
Younger drys is the Genus and species of an artic flower that the sudden cold period from 12,900 years ago to 11,650 years ago (roughly).
Temperature changes of 15 degrees Celsius, as shown in the graphs, in such a short time.... why?
12900 minus 11300 is only 1600 years or 16 centuries between temperature going suddenly up, to go down suddenly also, and back up again to enter the present warm period.
Can you imagine such huge changes happening between the present and the 4th century after Jesus?
The best thing that we can say is that we are very ignorant while pretending to have the right answer for any question.
The Dire Wolf is a common fantasy staple, i believe it comes from Dungeons and Dragons. It may be based on the real thing.
Of note I just watched a vid about Saber tooth's fossil at the tar pits in California ,Saber tooth bones from the tar had some with terrible injuries that healed or still on going issue for the Cat .(One cat had a dislocated hip ,and terrible infection ,but the hip area was trying to heal ,the cat only died getting trapped in the tar pits .They wouldn't have being able to hunt unless they were in a group /pride .
Megalania prisca a 4,500-pound 25-foot monitor lizard that was the Pleistocene apex predator of Australia.
another great video, Doc! I'll make it easy for you to watch GoT..only watch the first season, and read the books (or don't yet, because the series is not complete) 🙂
:0 omg this show is about me
Thank you 🙏
Thank you. You make this very easy to understand 😊. The charts are especially helpful. One of your earlier videos probably covered my question; but, how do we know what the temperatures and CO2 levels were millions of years ago ?
There are various proxies (signatures in the rocks) we can use to reconstruct past T & CO2, I talk about this at length in the 'how we study earths past' video, here's the link if you want to check it out: th-cam.com/video/J9Te_sGZ_c0/w-d-xo.htmlsi=__PJeeHmpyJE06d7 ;)
Smilodon has such a specialized kill method for large prey I imagine they were more solo hunters rather than large prides.
I like the anthrocothere. they are so cute.
I missed you.😢
Your pronunciation of 'Bølling-Allerød' was actually fairly good :)
Shocking convergent evolution between Glyptodon and Ankylosaurus
You should see Doedicurus
@@posticusmaximus1739 even more shocking
Some two-legged marauders? UPDATE: 'dryas' means tree in Greek.
Great video, always love your stuff! You said sabre-toothed tigers are big cats, but I don't think that's true. Smilodon is the genus, correct? Big cats refers specifically to the genus Panthera, which is why cheetahs and pumas are not big cats. So I don't think sabre-tooths would fall under that clade either.
The two earlier geologic periods where the dryas flower was abundant in Europe are the Oldest Dryas (approx. 18,500-14,000 BP) and Older Dryas (~14,050-13,900 BP), respectively
Danish person here, your pronunciation of Bølling-Allerød isn't that far off.
Oh thank goodness, what a relief. I actually looked up how to pronouce it beforehand and found a danish person pronounce it on youtube but I couldn't figure out how to say it like he did haha, I just can't make my vowels sound that way! I've gotta practice ;)
Rachel is back! I'm sure I'm not the only one who noticed you didn't post a video last week: we all deserve time-off, and I hope you enjoyed yours. Welcome back!
Thank you so much! Yep, two weeks off actually! (sorry for the break, it was not intentional, I just overbooked myself on other projects haha) Hope you enjoy the video :D
Two weeks off! But who’s counting! 😊
@@GEOGIRL I almost exprienced a mega fauna extinction event, suffering from what I think was a generalized infection disorder supposedly reversed by broad specrum antibiotocs. It woundn't be the first time.... There are other theorists who think that the desese resistance of humans is not all that advanced as compared to crocidillians... To be sure I need to read the diognostic report now that I am feeling a bit stronger after two days.
I also like her videos a lot.
Her ability to communicate is great. Her speech is very clear, and I love her accent, too.
The only thing that disturbs her videos is that she must fit the official narrative in order to get a good job at any university.
I'm afraid that we must wait until she retires and she's free to talk her truth in order to hear the right conclusions on a lifetime, learning more and more as time goes by.
@@josemariatrueba4568 My impression is that things that have to do with eocnomics and politics and commersce [like medicine] twisted at the university and often become non arts where as basic scinece is pure art-science. Why is my imression wrong?
informative
Hmmm rapid cooling seems responsible for many of these extinctions... what about areas around the equator?
I really think the best evidence that climate change had the most impact is the African megafauna that managed to survive alongside humans to this day. The big difference is that Africa did not experience the same dramatic climate change as the regions where megafauna went extinct.
We also have the animals that survived and thrived in the vacuum after the other megafauna went extinct. Bison being a good example. They became the prime prey of the bloodthirsty human hunters and yet the bison population numbered 60 million just 150 years ago despite being hunted aggressively by the Native Americans throughout their history.
It is in direct opposition to the idea that human predation caused the extinction event.
I believe humans could have had an impact on species already on the brink, but I don't think they were any more to blame than any other predator.
WRONG.
No, mega fauna still existing in Africa where humans evolved is good evidence that humans caused extinctions in other continents where there weren't early human populations.
Mega-pleisto-faunication 🎶
all of these animal family names are so outrageous, being some crazy word, but in the 80's or something someone decided they wanted to use the word "dinosaur" as one of those names, and then somehow the definition for dinosaur that existed for over 100 years just "goes extict"?? BTW english doesn't work that way, ye-old english words can still be used and their ye-old meanings still apply. I mean except dinosaur somehow. Somehow dimetrodon just isn't a dinosaur anymore, even when all of these crazy animal familia names are literally just so that there is a unique word, and have nothing to do with spoken language. A bug is still a bug, even if it's a spider, and a chicken ... is not a dinosaur. It's a fun thought experiment, and it may work out that as a descendent they can be classified in the clade dinosauria (a different word, btw) meaning that a chicken can be called a dinosauria (a different word, btw) , but a dimetrodon , regardless of its status as a synapsid, is one of the original dinosaurs, was a dinosaur for over 100 years, and remains today, a dinosaur.
Wow! I never knew that giant armadillos existed. I always thought armadillos were small burrowing creatures. It's amazing to think about all the giant creatures that roamed the Earth during the Pleistocene Epoch. I wonder what other creatures we don't know about?
There is still the giant armadillo today, which can weigh over 100 lbs
I wonder why the straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus, which was alao an animal from that time, went extinct.
"Mega" is probably because of downsized modern counterparts, but truly "Mega", tons way above, took place before KPg extinction. Super-Mega? Curious things are: 1) land animals underwent miniaturization, roughly speaking, 2) those giants are mainly composed of herbivorous members, while predators are way lighter, compared to the Mesozoic era, & 3) gigantism in mammals (although not presented here avian giants shared the same fate). Compare to extinction events in this site, this time around it looks as if less complex. Earlier videos demonstrated narratives ranging wide, series of geological setups etc. That may indicate this extinction event might be quite different, despite climate change, overall condition might be relatively calm without noticeable volcanic activities or receding coastlines etc. This video may need sequel! By the way, was the extinction featured here limited to landscape, no coinciding things happening in the ocean?
I think that human predation played a role in the extinction of the Megafauna, Rachael, remember these very large animals needed large ranges to feed, they had long gestation times (The African elephant at 22 months is the longest) so reproduced slowly and took a long time to mature sexually. This means that the survival rate amongst Megafauna young only to drop a few percent (Due to human predation) for the populations to start collapsing.
needs more australia
And giant beaver
Rangel Island Mammoth extinct 3,750 years ago, humans appeared their 500 years later (3,250 years ago). In that case it was a crisis in the food they ate and probably genetic continuity in immune system due to isolation. Human activity did play a role in the extinctions worldwide though. There was also a smaller Sicilian Mammoth extinct (I believe 9,500 years ago), miniature Paleo-Loxodonta on Flores and Komodo Island in the Lesser Sunda region of Sumatra. Although the terror bird age was really the Paleocene there were variations in South America until the Holocene, now only the Red-Legged Seriena bird exist from this lie but is the size of a roadrunner.
It doesn't have to be much hunting. If the local population of 'Megafauna Species' can handle the loss of 100 individuals in an average year (natural causes, etc.) and humans move in and bring the death rate up to 101 or 102 that species is going to go locally extinct....although it might take a thousand years and never look like humans are hunting the species 'a lot'. (I would put cash on the Younger Dryas having multiple relevant causes.)
nice
Good video, the Younger Dryas is an interesting twist, but it's awfully hard to believe that even a somewhat faster cooling/warming could have substantially impacted such very widespread species that were all highly mobile and had endured millions of years and many ice ages previously. As you say, the timing of human arrival is real suspicious....
How come we are trying to revive wholly mammoths and not giant armadillos!!??!?
I think it is because we have more complete genomes reconstructed for the mammoths than we have for the glytodons :)
I think it's time for a Pleistocene Park movie.
Pleistocene time corresponds to Old Stone Age / Paleolithic
Mesolithic period of human culture being found in the boundary. But the entire definition of "Holocene" and thus end of the Pleistocene is very much anthropocentric.
Also for we anthropologists, this suggests a hypothesis of correlation and _causation_. Cold at the beginning caused homo habilis to invent culture and language !! Extinction of megafauna food caused Homo sapiens to invent domestication of plants and animals, and live in settlements rather than nomads following game.
take10charles.blogspot.com/2024/06/stone-age-genus-homo-lecture-in.html
The one thing that megafauna needed to survive was high oxygen levels. That's why they either shrunk or died out when oxygen levels crashed 65m years ago. Even human life spans were greatly reduced.
0:54 - We're not in the Holocene anymore, Rachel, we're now in the Anthropocene.
Depending on your definition of Anthropocene, Holocene might not even exist. There's no consensus at all about this distinction.
The sloth, likely evolved slothiness as their movements resembled breeze blown movements of trees & leaves (not known yet), the giants were likely losing their slothiness, being a sever handicap
If you make " mega fauna of the holocene" into a t-shirt, I will buy one😉 also maybe add an arrow pointing to the wearers face like my " I'm with stoopid" t-shirt.
Haha I love that! ;D
Hey Rachel, I read all the comments (even the trolls), and the answer is Dungeons and Dragons. It's Dungeons and Dragons where Dire Wolves are most attributed in modern fantasy culture. There is Nordic mythology and Fenrir, also Lord of the Rings and Wargs. Although I don't know Game of Thrones, never watched the show or read the books, but I do love history and video games: I'd rather read about Wars of Roses and play Eldenring.
I could also swear I fought thousands of Dire Wolves in some JRPG like Final Fantasy or Shining Force ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
😄I'm sure the defining weight for megafauna is not meant to refer to babies like you say, BUT from a cursory look at google results, elephant newborns can be 200-250 pounds, blue whales newborns 5,000-6,000 pounds, hippos can exceed 100 pounds sometimes, and walrus often. Moose newborns only clock in at 28-35 (max 45) though and polar bears a surprisingly small 1.5 pounds. So some babies *do* in fact exceed 100 lbs at birth 😃
Gomphotheres lasted all the way to the end of the Pleistocene. Also, you missed the Australian megafauna. Humans arrived there earlier than in the Americas, so the extinctions are correspondingly earlier. Do an episode on them! Some megafauna extinctions occurred well into the Holocene, e.g, the Irish elk, or even within the modern historical period, e.g. the aurochs.
Also the big birdies.
Sooner or later people are going to have to face the fact that the continents broke apart in the days of Peleg, 100 years after the global flood.
* It’s the reason for the glacial striations stamped on top of bedrock like a gigantic broken seal in South America, Africa, India and Australia from glaciers that were moving from south to north from the time when they were all still connected to Antarctica at the South Pole. Of course this was after the sediment layers from the global flood were deposited.
* It’s the reason fossils and sediment layers line up between South America, Africa, Madagascar, India and Australia. (The fossils and sediment layers were deposited first and then the continents broke apart, 100 years after the global flood.)
* It’s also the reason there are many frozen animals and forest ecosystems buried by tsunamis from the rise of sea levels in North America and Siberia as the continents were being shoved into the Arctic from the centrifugal force after the earth broke apart, possibly due to hardening of the sediments and other factors.
* It’s the reason animals made it to South America from Africa and humans did not since they were still trying to build the Tower of Babel before the breakup of the continents. Jaguars were separated from leopards, greater grisons were separated from African honey badgers, tapirs were separated from …tapirs, otters were separated from otters and all of the other animals arrived at various places around the world before the breakup of the continents.
* It’s the reason why the lifespan of humans was cut in half a second time since the global flood from a less than 500 year lifespan to a less than 250 year lifespan.
* It’s the reason why the meaning of the word Peleg in Hebrew that meant “divided” turned into “as (where) the waters flow” in the later Aramaic form of Hebrew. That’s quite an impressive change in meaning.
* It’s the reason people isolated into family groups and began speaking their own language. (Everything that happens is of course by the power of God.)
*Last but not least, it’s the reason penguins never made it to the Arctic since there was no land there for them to breed in the Arctic. …And now you know the rest of the story, the whole story.
Stomped by Gomphotheres! 😮 Oh! Oh no!
Some of these names write themselves. The dire wolf. The situation is dire if meeting one, being so much bigger than the grey wolf. And Smilodon, the smile you would never want to see.
“Punctuated equilibrium is the idea that evolution occurs in spurts instead of following the slow, but steady path that Darwin suggested. Long periods of stasis with little activity in terms of extinctions or emergence of new species are interrupted by intermittent bursts of activity.”
I'm very ok with however you pronounce the names , I still know what you're talking about.
How many humans are we talking about...and how many megafauna...sounds like a few hundred
Man had to eat they must have been pretty good
I would consider a baby moose to be mega fauna lol
Blew my mind when I discovered direwolves were real. Though I guess it (kind of) makes sense, what with Game of Thrones being set in what appears to be a pre-medieval or very early medieval era...
Wow... :)
I think that the megafauna wipeout was due to rapid climate change, though there might have been an over hunting aspect. when there were so few of them. This rapid climate change was caused by a comet impact, there is very much evidence for this: a burnout layer across the current US that radio-carbon dates to this period, the presence of nano-diamonds in this layer. This destroyed much of the vegetation, which killed off the herbivores, then the carnivores had nothing to eat. The humans being hunter gatherers, lost what they gathered, then hunted down the few remaining megafauna. This is a broad stroke explanation.
I think this video was good, but it misses a lot. It only covers a tiny fraction of the megafaunal losses, mainly the famous American taxa. Even that is a small sampling of the American extinctions. The diversity of life we lost is truly staggering, from "wombat-lions" to club-tailed horned turtles to giant "ostrich-ducks" to beavers the size of bears, and literally dozens and dozens if not hundreds of other unique examples. I read about this stuff a lot and I still regularly come across bizarre, fantastical beasts I never knew existed, but which humans encountered once upon a time.
This gets into the second point: these extinctions were extremely global, affecting literally every single continental landmass and large island in the world excluding Antarctica, and took place across tens of thousands of years (the earliest starting perhaps 100,000 years ago, although 80,000 is a more robustly demonstrable date). The Younger Dryas only attempts to explain one of these events, though it was a big one, involving the Americas. It does even that poorly: it wasn't anything special whatsoever, and climatic fluctuations on par with this or even more intense occurred regularly and never wiped out American megafauna, or had any discernible impact at all, really.
The fact that humans arrived exactly coincident with the start of the decline is the smoking gun. It not only happened here, but on literally every single landmass where megafauna went extinct. Every last one of them, without a sole exception, coincides exactly with local human arrival. This isn't a coincidence, as I've said for many years, and in the past few years many very high-quality studies have entirely put this question to rest, with studies looking at both local and global extinctions confirming the "sufficient and necessary" role of humans. None of the other "Big Five" extinctions is thought to have been caused by mild, local climatic fluctuations, though they were similar in scale to this current one.
I like that you said that the human hypothesis is not just about hunting. I personally am not sure hunting was even a very important factor, given the sheer scales involved. Humans are more effective at altering habitats, spreading diseases, etc, which are some of the things you mention. I think it is a tragedy that the human hypothesis gets reduced to just "overhunting on steroids", because there is a lot more involved here. Really though, it doesn't matter all that much how they did it. Humans gonna human, and it is very clear from the patterns what the impact of that has been, continuously from 80,000 years ago right up to this day.
Otherwise, a few nitpicks: there are a few animals whose babies are actually megafaunal, by the 45kg/100lb definition. Elephants can have newborns weighing over 200lbs, and rhino babies can be over 100lbs. Whale babies are much bigger.
I like your overview of proboscidean evolution, but when you say "and finally modern elephants", it makes it seem as though modern elephants are more recently-evolved than mammoths or mastodons (or _Paleoloxodon_, gomphotheres, other recently extinct proboscideans). This is not the case; they are all exactly equally modern. Tens of thousands of years is a blink of an eye evolutionarily. The ones that survived are the lucky ones, but they haven't changed, and if these extinct guys were still around, they'd look and act the same as they did. This applies to all the Late Pleistocene and later extinctions.
Giant short-faced bears (_Arctodus_) were probably omnivores, or even primarily herbivorous. The only living tremarctine bear, the spectacled bear, is the second most herbivorous living bear (over 90% of the diet). In fact, all living bears besides the polar bear are omnivorous, and most have at least some populations, at least seasonally, which are very herbivorous. Studies on _Arctodus_ suggest variability, with some bears being very carnivorous and others very herbivorous, very similar to modern brown bears. But I would bet they were more herbivorous overall, as some researchers suggest.
Humans are often blamed for extinction of mammoths & others. One thing not quite clear is in hunting scene of them. Seemingly mammoths were inhabitants of harsh, cold place, which is very tough for the early humans. Is it probably a biased view? Alternatively, mammoths could be seasonally migrants for which humans used to take an opportunistic hunting fest? It seems those wooly giants were away from ordinary human activities (hunting) ecologically. What do think?
I've been a megafauna this whole time...
Your forgetting some rather major creatures that lived during the Plasticine epoch such as Gumby and Pokey & Wallace and Gromit.
The Game of Thrones books are far better than the TV show anyway. But they might still be hard to put down and I'm sure your very busy with your career and etcetera. Book 5 came out in 2011. Book 6 is still not out though I think I heard it's finished and they're sposed to be at least 7 or 8 books, which will be diverging from the plot in the show... I didn't feel the need to rewatch the TV series after I binged it that one time
About the time you are talking about a comet/asteroid possible plural, struck
the 1 to 2 mile thick N. American ice sheets. Rapid melting that flooded the country.
Carolina Bays attest to this. Ocean levels are said to have risen 300 ft. rapidly.
The western topography in places also proves this. This is probably the 1st flood.
The second was 200 miles east of Madagascar called The Burckle Crater 18 miles
in diameter around 5000 BC. One two punch.
Why was there no local extinction in Madagascar then? The extinctions there only occurred about 2,000-1,000 years ago, exactly coincident with human arrival. In fact, these extinctions as a whole span the entire world and tens of thousands of years. A single impact at a single moment does not even come close to explaining this.
Humans modify their environment to taste better than most other animals. This proclivity has far ranging impacts.
On the plus side . . . it's bad enough when a young male African elephant is in musth, or a helper elephant goes on a psychotic rampage. Imagine if it were a Paleoloxodon o, more apropos, a wooly mammoth..
In fact, the butterfly effect was named after the central device of Ray Bradbury's story of time traveling big game hunting. In his epic adventure, it was humans wiping out the non avian dinosaurs before humans were a thing . . . leading to Homer Simpson in the land where it rains donuts. Ah science . . . what would we do without you? Mmm . . . donuts . . . aglaglaglkagl . . .
5X5 Datil New Mexico Territory
I think the current thinking with the Short faced bears, either Arctotherium or Arctodus, is that they probably weren't very carnivorous, this is supported by their large size, close relatives (Brown bears are already quite vegetarian, but Short Faced Bears's closest relatives are Spectacled Bears who's diet is over 90% plant matter, its only really Polar bears that have specialised into a large obligate predatory role), teeth morphology, lack of appearance in predator traps like the La Brea tar pits and I think some work done on the isotopes of their remains that suggest a diet where meat was rare. If that's the case they probably weren't much effected by the declines in potential prey items in contrast to Lions, Saber-tooth cats and Wolves in the environment around them.
I wish we knew more about the ecological interactions of the Pleistocene megafauna with each other and their environment. I sometimes wonder if early humans might have wiped out one or two species that just happened to be keystone species or ecosystem engineers and the cascade of impacts to the rest of the species and the larger ecosystem that would have followed.
Geomagnetic excursion. Check into it because we're in another one right now.
😎