| Man caused all mass and background extinctions! |
Man causes all extinctions!
Whenever the paleo-mathemagician can't figure out recent extinctions he blames them squarely on Man.
Left to his devices, all background and mass extinctions since we parted company with chimps (in the
last 6 million years) are the result of overkill. Genetically modern humans (our forefathers) killed off the
Neanderthals. The Clovis People who came through the Bering Straights killed off the megafauna. And
the cowboys exterminated the Passenger Pigeon. People are periodically conditioned to memorize this
by heart and everybody nods. Everyone thinks, "Yes. Man is the source of all evil. We are destroying
our habitat. We corner the animals and pollute the air." So no one investigates whether any of this stands
up to closer scrutiny.
.
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| The History of Life on Earth |
Momma Nature retires "I'm getting too old for this job and it's getting boring. Aeon after aeon, volcanoes and asteroids, asteroids and volcanoes... I think I will create an arrogant being to do my killing for me from now on..." |
- Let's first eliminate our cousins the Neanderthals from the list of victims. Let's also remove the Passenger
Pigeon since we seem to be tangentially responsible at best. We were not their murderers. Man should
be released from his self-imposed life sentence. Our intelligent species has been falsely accused and
condemned in these cases. Maybe we were responsible for wiping out the Dodos, but even that was not
documented well enough to really arrive at an informed verdict that would stand in a court of law.
We certainly killled the last Taz Tiger in the wild and jailed the last one, which ended her days in captivity.
But how did these two fellows end up being the last two Taz Tigers in the first place? Was it when Man
appeared on the Thylacine's horizon?
It turns out that like all of the members of the Holocene megafauna, the Taz Tigers had already lost their
genetic diversity. These 'tigers' had been around for too long and it was time for them to go. Was Man
also responsible for washing their genes?
The definition of Paleo-Mathemagician
One fanatic crusader for the overkill theory was Paul Martin, a paleo-mathematician who developed the
theory that the worldwide Pleistocene extinction of mammals was the result of human overhunting. It is
pertinent at this point to define the term 'paleo-mathematician before we continue...
- paleo-mathematician: a bone duster and collector who thinks of himself
as a paleontologist, but explains ancient extinctions with catastrophies
and environmental change and blames all recent and future extinctions
on Man and global warming (that we are also responsible for).
Whenever you hear that some catastrophic agent or climate change killed a species, you know that the
speaker is a deluded paleo-mathemagician who has no clue. He was trained in college to repeat
mechanically that Man is the cause of all extinctions some time after the dinosaurs.
What is suspicious about Martin's argument is that the Clovis seemed to be pretty picky eaters for hunter-
gatherers that lived day to day...
- "even though no small mammals in the local community became extinct,
species losses and gains, combined with changes in abundance, caused
declines in both the evenness and richness of communities"
Perhaps overkillers can argue that Clovis overdid his calorie intake with mastodons, mammoths, giant
ground sloths, and short-face bears, but they would be hard pressed to justify why at the Samwell Cave
Popcorn Dome in Northern California:
- 1. the Mazama pocket gopher and mountain beaver disappeared entirely
- 2. the population of deer mice and Botta’s pocket gopher expanded
- Were the Clovis using their machine guns to kill gophers and beavers? Is this how they exterminated the
tiny critters to the last individual? Were these pioneers such picky eaters that they left the other gofers
alone?
Timing
Where did the paleo-mathematicians get the idea that humans killed off the megafauna 12,000 years
ago?
They inferred it from the timing. Humans arrived in the Americas allegedly through the Bering Straights
and shortly after the megafauna began to disappear. The same thing seems to have happened to the
Neanderthals. Our ancestors arrive in Europe around 45,000 years ago and the Neanderthals became
extinct anywhere between 40,000 and 28,000 years ago. Ergo, humans are the deadliest disease all
other species of animals catch. When we appear, they're gone! We just need to fudge a little with the
dates and it all falls into place. But this only makes it easy on the skeptic. If the dates are off, the
conclusions don't follow.
Fudging the dates
A good example of fudging with the dates is what happened 'down under'. In Australia the megafauna
became extinct around 46,000 years ago. Unable to blame the extinction of the large marsupials on
climate, asteroids and volcanoes, the paleontologists had little recourse but to fall back on the only other
option they know: Man.
The theory is a no-brainer. Man arrives on an island and animals begin to disappear. It's a cinch! The
common layman, bombarded daily with news about habitat destruction and endangered species has no
problem relating to that. Therefore, the paleontologist who proposes climate or Man as the culprit is
safe and can publish his nonsense with the approval of his peers. They all think alike. They were all
brainwashed alike! We're done! We've found the cause of extinction. Let's close the book.
However, there seems to be too much eagerness on the part of unimaginative researchers to make the
arrival of Man coincide just a bit too neatly with the marsupial mass extinction. It turns out that the arrival
of the first settlers in Australia has been heatedly debated for years and the jury is still out. The first two
or three estimates candidly placed the presence of humans in Australia anywhere from 20,000 to 35,000
years ago. Unfortunately, their appearance was too late to have influenced events and left extinction
theorists unhappy. Therefore, a new super-duper, thorough, once-in-a-lifetime study recalculated the
colonization and set it at around 60,000 years ago. However, this conclusion was troubling because
several tests showed that a skeleton used to make that determination could not be older than the layer it
was found in which was no older than 50,000 years ago.
What should we conclude?
Well, it looks like another case of religious zealots tailoring the dates to suit their preconceived conclusions.
You fudge and nudge and tamper a little with the dates and the overkill theory seems ever more palatable.
The paleo-mathemagicians did it with Neanderthal. They also did it with the Chicxulub 'crater'. So why not
with the Holocene megafauna?
Holocene Scene "Oh no! Here comes Man. Everyone run for your lives or you'll soon become extinct!" |
The case of the Sparassodonta
Competitive displacement was first considered as a mechanism of extinction for the marsupial-like
sparassodonta that disappeared in South America in the Miocene 3 million years ago. The theory was
that the arrival of new predators displaced them and/or hunted them to extinction. However, further
analysis led to the recurring problem of dating. The sparassodonta died at least 4 million years before
the arrival of the new rulers of the plains. The notion that the appearance of a new predator displaces
existing apex predators is an extension of the human-overkill theory. It rarely if ever happened. Maybe
the last group of X were hunted down and killed by the Y. What a genuine paleontologist has to explain
is how the X ended up being so few in the first place.
