This week a study carried out by scientists at the University of Essex in England got picked up far and wide. It purported to prove once and for all that overhunting or some other excessive behavior by prehistoric man such as setting out-of-control fires led to the extinction of many large-scale mammals (megafauna) such as mammoths, woolly rhinos and sabertooth tigers. Their computer-generated data supposedly now ruled out climate change as the cause. The study is behind a paywall and probably too technical for the lay reader (including me) but the takeaway is conveyed by this graph, which indicates that there is a direct relationship between the rate of extinction and geography. They occur most frequently on islands and the smaller the island, the greater the risk. This should come as no surprise and it would likely rule out woolly mammoths becoming extinct on some South Pacific island.
full: http://louisproyect.org/2015/08/16/racism-and-the-overhunting-hypothesis/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
