The Appearance Of Homo Sapiens And The Disappearance Of Various Species Of Large Mammals

Luckily, humans have put in efforts to understand and sometimes reverse the damage done. Wilcove describes ecosystem restoration, where usually humans put concentrated effort into recreating original habitats to restore indigenous populations. This is, unless “a very different assemblage of species has taken hold of the land and cannot be dislodged,” also known as a new “steady state” (Wilcove, 2000, p. 12). Wilcove himself joined the effort by studying the impacts humans have caused on woodland critters. He surveyed an area in Maryland to detect predators by setting cardboard coated in masonry powder to record footprints. He concluded that there were “six predators: opossum, raccoon, striped skunk, dog, cat, and blue jay. All are animals that benefit mightily from their association with people”(Wilcove, 2000, p. 42). He also mentions how extensive data can only be collected when looking at the observations of many people over the generations. He talks about “generational blindness,” which means how observers of a current generation cannot make conclusions on populations without the help of data collected from the past (Wilcove, 2000, p. 13).

The reading by Paul S. Martin, Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America, explores the idea that extinction is a phenomenon that could be explained by human arrival. Humankind has an impact on animal extinction. He says: “based on the concept that animal populations could have sustained some additional predation, but not as much as took place after human arrival, this explanation has come to be known as overkill “(Martin, 48). In this passage Martin is explaining that humans are predators and upon their arrival many animals died. Martin also goes on to say that meteor strikes and climatic

The first example of human manipulation of changes within the biosphere is through expansion. The rapid growth of the population has led to expansion in development; the need for more space is causing strain on other living organisms such as plants and animals. Human procurement of forest, grass, and wetlands has weighed on the animal population heavily. As a result of this domination, animals have lost areas they use to thrive in, causing migration and in more serious cases extinction. Animals are a prevalent source of protein for humans, and when a species is threatened by extinction, it not only disrupts the balance of the ecosystem, but it also disrupts the food chain. The more resources that are required to sustain human life, the bigger the need to migrate to surrounding areas in a short period of time (Haines).

The scale and pace of change is dramatic; for example, the extinction of species is occurring at around 100-fold pre-human rates4. The population sizes of vertebrate species have, on average, declined by half over the last 45 years5. More than 2.3 million km2 of primary forest has been felled since 20006. About

S. 969). In order to prove the viability of an overkill theory, Martin constructed a model that would consider both the expanding population of an invading people and the population of megafauna that they are hunting throughout their colonization. He determined that even a very large biomass (in this case the megafauna) of 2.3 X 10^ 8 metric tons could be overkilled within just 1,000 years by a biomass of no more than 10^6 metric tons of Clovis hunters (Martin P. S. 972). Additionally, Martin argued that carnivores that Clovis hunters were not hunting such as the saber-tooth tiger would have become extinct around this time because of the removal of their herbivore prey (Grayson and Meltzer 586).

There have been five major mass extinction on earth triggered by a distinguishable event, but in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert writes of the narrative of the sixth extinction caused directly by human impact. The book identifies the effects of human activity on how, over humans history on earth, the natural world has been affected. Every environmental impact stems into three basic groups of global problems to nature: Pollution, Habitat loss and Invasive Species. Kolbert explains that each impact can be traced back to one source, human industrial development. With each impact various types of life in the natural world are affected. Deforestation, urbanization, and sea level rise contribute to habitat loss worldwide. When humans began to travel they also brought invasive species and disease along with them; as boats only became bigger more and more invasive species travel. This reverse engineering of the planet species, brings new species that don’t have any natural predators, thus having an easier time driving native species out to endangerment or extinction. The different outcomes that come from human pollution is separated throughout the book, but the idea remains constant; with the development of human culture, pollution has drastically impacted a vast extent of species habitats and their environment.

Humans played a major role in the extinction of large mammals because hunters possibly killed them off. They were also slaughtered with knives and stampeded over cliffs at that time at which their species became less and less. to extinction in a period already providing great stress due to the receding ice sheets as the last glacial maximum came to an end. Later, this would mean a lack of analogues

During the Eocene epoch, 47,000,000 years ago, one of our ancestors lived in what is now Germany. She was still young, her baby teeth still intact and probably less than a year old. This little girl came to a lake’s edge for a drink of water; cupping the water with her hand she slowly drank the water while holding onto a branch with her other hand. Our ancestor died there when she was overcome by an underground gas bubble that erupted, the fumes leaving her unconscious; she fell into the water and drowned. Her body slowly drifted to the bottom of the lake with a myriad of other creatures. The lake where she was buried eventually filled with mud and algae that turned into oily shale

While it is important to understand the significance of each hypothesis, the questions surrounding the Neanderthal extinction takes on assorted factors that are not mutually exclusive. Numerous studies have been conducted focusing exclusively on climate, competition or disease as a function of Neanderthal extinction. However, conflicting conclusion suggest that there are several factors involved that overlap and/ or arising from one another. This paper will attempt to better understand how climate, competition, and disease might operate together to account for Neanderthal extinction. First by summarizing each argument of the three arguments and identifying the potential implications for father research. Secondly, aim to develop a framework that will include the most relevant hypothesis.

In this paper, I will be summarizing the theory of overkill in chapter two of ‘’Twilight of the Mammoths’’, by Paul Martin. Before, I get into this started a little background information about who the author is. Martin was a scientist that studied forms of life existing in prehistoric times that was represented by the fossils of plants and animals. His overkill theory was that he argued, that humans were very much responsible of over hunting for the Late Pleistocene extinction of megafauna of mammoth, slots and Neanderthals in northern Eurasia and North and South America in the last thousands years ago. ‘’ to me the core piece of evidence for human involvement is that when viewed globally, near time extinctions took place episodically, in a pattern not correlating with climatic change or any known factor other than the spread of species. Extinctions followed prehistoric human colonization’s in a ‘’deadly syncopation’’ to use the words of mammalogist Ross MacPhee. (Martin, 51) It was also stated that when humans moved into different areas of the world that’s when huntable animals were wiped out. The archaeological

In a summary, Kolbert explains the extinctions of a variety of different major animal species that became extinct. She also explains that if trends in the environment continue that the biggest extinction in history will occur soon. If global warming, deforestation, and glaciers continue to melt she says that more and more species will continue to become extinct. She explains how humans need to be more conservative and careful with what they’re doing to prevent extinction.

It is known that humans coexisted with Megafauna and there is evidence to back this up, Aborigines entered Australia from Indonesia around 60,000 years ago, which also had its own Megafauna. Previously it was said that humans caused the Megafauna to go extinct as the Aboriginals hunted the Megafauna over the following 15,000 years and created fires to destroy the habitats of them, it was said that the fires burnt down the trees and bushes to created a flat landscape to make it easier for the Aboriginals to live and hunt.

The late Pleistocene has been link with the extinction of large mammals, this extinction has been identified as a human-driven process since Paul Martin saw a contributing link between the extinction of large mammalian species and the appearance of humans. However, this does not mean that megafauna was not going to become extinct without human interference. This essay will provide detailed analysis and assessment of the Overkill hypothesis, which argues that the megafaunal extinction in America and Eurasia was caused by humans. In recent years many papers

It’s clear that a great extinction is coming from the evidence of the destruction of other species around us. The choices made by the human race have too often negatively affected the surrounding species. Tracy Wilson, the site director for HowStuffWorks.com, in an article for Animal Planet, states that

Since before the industrial evolutions humans have been pumping green house gasses—carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons— into the atmosphere however, it wasn’t until recently that the amounts being produced are shoving the Earth into a sixth extinction. While the causes of this upcoming extinction are constantly debated on it has earned itself the name Holocene extinction. This name is derived from the theory that humans are the main contributors to this extinction. To investigate the cause Elizabeth Kolbert, and American journalist and professor at Williams College, took the world on a wild and saddening journey on the human contribution to this looming extinction in her novel, The Sixth Extinction; An Unnatural History. Not only does Kolbert’s book explain how humans have contributed to global warming and its effects on life on land but also ocean acidification and how life under the sea has changed over the years.