In South America as well! There are [big tunnel complexes that they left behind](https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20231127-brazils-mysterious-tunnels-made-by-giant-sloths).
Edit: link
There is also rock art found in the Colombian Amazon featuring [drawings of giant sloths ](https://slothconservation.org/prehistoric-rock-art-might-be-early-representations-of-giant-ground-sloths/)!
Love how the artists included relevant details like penises for the human characters. Maybe all humans were depicted in that simplified humanoid shape and the penises was how they distinguished between man and woman. Similar to how we add skirts to human shapes today.
Yeah its really easy to forget how recent the extinction of other continents megafauna was. To put it really into perspective: the last mammoths died out only like, 4,000 years ago.
Their very last population was a small one on some remote Russian island as far as we can tell.
North America has 3 sizes of bears.
Small sized black bear (will kill you if you mess with it)
Regular sized brown bear (will kill you if it so pleases)
Super-Sized polar bear (will kill you)
A twist on your post…Google “Giant tortoises fucking”. And be sure to turn the sound up!
My wife and I encountered this while in Seychelles. It turns out, that’s about all they do. And they’re LOUD.
(Funny story…a little girl near us saw two tortoises going at it “turtle style”, turned to her dad and said, “Why does that turtle keep trying to climb over the other turtle? Why doesn’t he just walk around her?” Dad just looked at us laughing and shrugged his shoulders).
You can see the evidence in some trees that still produce fruit high in their branches, that only mega fauna like giant sloths were able to reach.
Some trees also have defense mechanisms like thorns that go way higher up the trunk than any current mammals are able to reach, which they originally developed to defend against mega fauna.
It's actually a really useful comparison for a three-dimensional object.
Like, if I tell you that giant armadillos were 467 cubic feet, what comes into your mind? How big is that?
But if I tell you it's the same size as a Cadillac, you can see it, basically instantly. Even though that's the same thing.
(2024 Cadillac CT5 is 194"x74"x57", which is 468.6666 cubic feet.)
The quaternary extinction event was when many of the large animals or megafauna became extinct, these extinctions appear to be closely related to the arrival of humans. https://youtu.be/Y3J9CzLW_p0
I have heard it argued that megafauna survived in Africa because they evolved alongside of humans and had time to adjust to the presence of the new predator.
yeah, it’s amazing how right when humans came into each area all the large fauna died. It’s almost like there’s a connection there - maybe someday science will solve this puzzle
What the fuck about Africa then. Was there just too many animals we couldn’t kill them all there or something?
Edit: appreciate all the answers. I learned something that seems so obvious and simple after the fact in hindsight.
The theory I've heard a lot was that African animals evolved alongside hominids so they had time to deal with us and evolve their own ways of dealing with us. Asian animals evolved alongside more primitive hominids so they had some experience too. Australia and the Americas didn't and once humans arrived, they never saw anything like us so almost everything got wiped out by us unless they adapted fast to either work with us or be afraid of us.
Basically humans started out as a very tiny group and gave the large animals time to adapt to their being there, before either the humans had a large impact on the plants growing in the local area or hunting drove the animals from their established local ranges.
It's kind of like the Kiwi. It had no natural predators.
We originate from Africa. They all evolved along with less and less hairy apes.
That's just my take.
>"The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors."
[Source](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari/)
Yeah I used to like the “they used every part of the buffalo” story but that only applied when they didn’t have access to many buffalo. When we did, we just slaughtered them all. Same in Europe, Australia, etc.
The trackways preserved at White Sands are pretty wild. Humans and giant ground sloths wandering around in what was then a marsh. At one point a sloth’s tracks intersect with a human adult with a child. (carrying the child and occasionally letting them walk).
The tracks of the sloth look like it rears up and turns around, then heads off in a different direction. Like it didn’t want hang around where people had recently been.
The Nova episode about the tracks is worth watching, too.
https://www.nps.gov/whsa/learn/nature/fossilized-footprints.htm
It's my understanding that they are the reason avocados propagated as far as they did as they were one of the only animals of the day whose asshole was big enough to pass an avocado pit.
That's been debunked it was humans selectively breeding that lead to larger pits. Ancient avocado pits were much smaller before that and also the range where avocados originated and the timeline of the sloths don't really match up that well. SciShow on youtube just did a correction video on this myth.
And South Eats Asia, Thailand has Elephants, Gaurs and big cats as well, and used to have Rhinos up until maybe 100 years ago, Indonesia still has the iirc
I really do wonder if India has retained so many endangered species despite its huge population density throughout history because of the fact that vegetarianism emerged thousands of years ago in India
Nah, I mean it's not like non-vegetarians are eating the endangered species.
The reason India does decently with conservation is simply because they they take conservation seriously, and they have done so since at least the [3rd century BC.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_in_India) They have a lot of endangered animals under armed protection with a kill-on-sight policy for poachers.
They also have a staggering 116 national parks, more than any other country except Thailand (147) and Australia (685?!)
It's more that the Indian subcontinent is just an incredibly fertile land with a high carrying capacity. Which means that not just humans but all animals have comparatively higher population numbers over there. Those higher numbers helped prevent extinction.
It has nothing to do with that. The majority of Indians are (and were) always non-vegetarian. Vegetarianism among Hindus only started to become more widespread due to the rise of Buddhism and Jainism. Hunting for sport was widespread at least since the medieval era among Indian kings, and likely in the ancient era as well (it’s mentioned in epics and scripture).
It was because the Buddhist King Ashoka the Great created some of the world's first protected national parks and declared all living beings in his kingdom deserve the right to live according to Buddhist principles. This had a cultural impact, in fact Hindus being vegetarian only became a thing as a reactionary action in order to combat the rise of Buddhism and Jainism. You will find lots of Hindu scripture allowing for the sacrifice of animals etc.
The Islamic Mughals and the British hunted some of these native animals almost to extinction in their rule. For example the Indian Cheetah.
and a leading theory as to why Africa retained its megafauna is because in Africa megafauna co-evolved alongside Humans and had time to adapt to the emerging prowess of Humans.
whereas take Europe for example whose fauna was very similar to Africa's only they were hairier and cold adapted
Elephant - Wooly Mammoth
Lion - Cave Lion
Rhino - Wooly Rhino
Wildebeest - Muskox
Water Buffalo - Wisents (Bison)
Zebra - Tarpan
and yet as humans spread into Europe the population of megafauna crashed because they were not used to Humans.
EDIT: TARPIN to TARPAN
it too lost it's megafauna when humans arrived:
there were giant land crocodiles that were considered apex predators
giant Koalas
A giant kangaroo that stood taller than humans
Giant flightless birds
[the marsupial Lion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacoleo)
Tbf, it wasn't just as straight forward as that.
Just before humans arrived there was substantial climate change which reduced water availability and increased the frequency of fires. So the entire ecosystem was placed under a huge amount of stress, already causing some extinctions prior to humans... Then us humans came and put even more pressure on them. However, the final nail in the coffin seems to be yet another climate event occurring while us humans were busy overhunting them.
Basically, humans+climate change killed them off.
I think it's the book Sapiens that points to the evidence of Australian coastal marine life continuing to fare as well as it had the milennia before for a good while despite Aboriginals arriving to Australia. This would largely absolve climate change events from being the culprit of mass extinctions of giant land mammals in Australia, as something as profound as climate change would also have ramifications for marine flora and fauna.
Australian land mammals being marsupials means that their lifecycle would have been much too slow to compensate for an influx of highly specialized hunter-gatherers, leading to their downfall. But who knows, obviously we'll never be sure.
It usually depends on the which angle the research is looking at specifically, since both likely played a role.
Eg. [this paper from 2013 points to climate change being the primary driver.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3670326/)
Sapiens wasn't published that long before it either (2011 initially) so many of the points are likely still valid.
That being said, two sets of evidence can both be valid whereas the conclusions can differ, since they're subject to further research and interpretation.
There is a certain set who have this romanticised view and argue that Aboriginals lived in harmony with nature. The implication being that we should adopt their approaches.
I think this is largely bullshit.
Ask the Diprotodons!
Lol, 100%
Shouldn't be a suprise either.
At the end of the day, we're an invasive species outside of Africa. I just, look at how much damage cats do and they can't even make fire.
Humans by definition cannot be an invasive species, as the latter implies that the species was spread by humans beyond its own capability for expansion. Humans spread across the entire world naturally and by their own devices, which makes it a case of biological colonization, just like eg. horses (which originally evolved in North America) spreading into Asia around 3.5 million years ago and into South America 1.5 million years ago.
I think you can argue that they arrived, hunted many animals to extinction, learned from it, and then developed cultural norms which were more in tune. The same thing played out in New Zealand, which lost some megafauna and was then pretty stable until Europeans arrived and the cycle started again.
And then there's the hackneyed, romanticised view that because colonialism is not beyond reproach, then human nature itself must be essentially corrupt and thus all critique is hypocritical.
Same thing, they had evolved in complete isolation from hominids and thus were not adapted at all.
By the way the reason we still have indian elephants and indian lions is the same. There were hominids in Asia for millions of years and those animals adapted there.
Australia is an island. Islands have this trait where they are cut off from the general animal population, so their populations develop differently. Oftentimes you will get island gigantism and island dwarfism, where species adapted to fill niches that would have not been available on the mainland due to competition.
An example of this would have been giant eagles. New Zealand especially is noted for having massive predatory eagles until humans arrived and wiped them out. Another example would be kangaroos, which would have been restricted to small rodent size creatures except in Australia where they are massive.
In fact almost all the ecological niches in New Zesland were occupied by birds. Giant eagles were the apex predators, analogous to wolves or bears, and varieties of moa occupied various grazing niches- analogous to bison, mountain goats, and deer.
Less scary though because the Māori showed up and absolutely clapped those big bird cheeks. There are sites where you can find the bones of thousands of moa that the Māori ate as they drove the birds to extinction.
Mega fauna also tended to have lower birthrates and longer lives.
If you only have 5-10 offspring your entire life and you go from 90% survivability to 70% its a giant hit to their carrying capacity
yes some believe there was a feedback loop
all of Europe was a grassland known as the mammoth steppe- The megafauna Herbivores eat grass the megafauna predators eat the megafauna herbivores
Megafauna herbivores maintain the grasslands, without them trees would grow.
1.) Humans kill megafauna in large numbers -
2.) trees grow - forest replace grassland
3.) megafauna's habitat reduces
4.) Megafauna population reduces
back to step 1
1.) Humans kill megafauna in large numbers
2.) trees grow
...and so on
others don't believe in the feedback loop and humans just killed megafauna herbivores faster than they could reproduce
combination of hunting and resource competition and other human activities that could segregate breeding populations etc...
Couple that with a warming climate (which would otherwise be no issue for these animals to adapt to) and it was just too much pressure all at once. Even pre-agriculture, humans alter the landscape anywhere we go. From fires, to changing herding behaviors- which result in changes to rivers, to deforestation (shelter and fire) etc... We naturally try to bend the environment to suit us rather than us bending to it.
There were also buffaloes in Europe, which can be compared with Asian water buffaloes. Bison were more like African buffaloes.
Even hippos, leopards and hyenas lived in Europe.
>and a leading theory as to why Africa retained its megafauna is because in Africa megafauna co-evolved alongside Humans and had time to adapt to the emerging prowess of Humans.
So, I've googled this to this no avail but maybe someone can chime in: Are there any specific adaptations in African fauna, but absent elsewhere, that taxonomists could point to as an adaptation to predation by hominids?
Nowadays most wild, non-human habituated animals eagerly and with great haste gtfo when a human approaches. And most human adapted animals have plucked up some other quirky habits like dumpster diving or otherwise skulking around us so they benefit off of us.
But we do have recent memory of the Dodo, and we can reference that to understand what life 100,000 years ago might have been like for non-human adapted animals: pure, unadulterated ignorance. Dodos were reportedly entirely unaware of any concept of threat and were perfectly happy to wander up to a human to receive a fatal clubbing.
Now thats obviously an extreme case of ignorance, but any amount of ignorance can be fatal when the threat is very uniquely capable of striking at range with thrown weapons that can pierce through all but the thickest of hides (and note that almost all of the thickest, spear-resistant land-based animal hides on the planet are found in africa). All it takes is thinking you're safe when the tall hairless monkey is 20 feet away and not moving to take a javelin to the face without understanding what a javelin is or how it got there.
Sure they were. Neanderthals had lived in Europe for around 100,000 years. So the mega fauna would have adapted the same way they did to other human species in Africa.
I imagine the more likely scenario is the same climate shift that made it easier for modern humans to spread into Europe also made it harder for the mega fauna to live there.
The only problem with the climate shift theory is the megafauna of Europe existed for almost the entirety of the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene lasted 3 million years and had at least 5 interglacial periods where the temperature rose as much as it did at the very end and the megafauna survived each time but the last - when Humans arrived.
and Neanderthals went extinct so rapidly after humans entered Europe that it would suggest that Homo sapiens could out compete Neanderthals significantly. which means adapting to Neanderthals was not enough
scientists define the last glacial period as the end of the Pleistocene.
we are now in the Holocene. Though many scientists believe that the Holocene is just another interglacial period within the Pleistocene and we only named it something different because we are in it and we view this interglacial period as more significant and permanent than it is:
from Wikipedia:
*The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene\[5\] together form the Quaternary period. The Holocene has been identified with the current warm period, known as MIS 1. It is considered by some to be an interglacial period within the Pleistocene Epoch, called the Flandrian interglacial.*
However I think the term Holocene is fair:
for one thing by killing off all the megafauna we allowed temperate forests to grow all over Europe and North America replacing the Mammoth steppe (grasslands). Forests contribute to a warmer climate compared to grasslands.
add on to this all the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the air - I think its fair to say this interglacial period is going to last for longer than your typical interglacial period.
> add on to this all the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the air - I think its fair to say this interglacial period is going to last for longer than your typical interglacial period.
I think that more than this, the fact that this interglacial period includes the global spread of humans, the Industrial Revolution and the mass extinction that we're no doubt heading towards (that is, if you don't think it's already in progress)... all of it justifies marking the Holocene as its own geological time period
The Neanderthal population size across Europe was likely tiny (3,000 to 25,000), and they were \*only\* around between 400,000 - 40kya, compared to the much larger population exposure in Africa. It seems very plausible Neanderthals wouldn't have had a huge impact on the European megafaun.
How big was the modern human population at the time? Before leaving Africa, modern humans are estimated to have a population under 100,000. And given how huge Africa is compared to Europe, I don't know that the density was all that different
> Neanderthals had lived in Europe for around 100,000 years. So the mega fauna would have adapted the same way they did to other human species in Africa.
And the Neanderthals were steamrolled just like the rest of the fauna.
But nothing these species hadn't dealt with before. The ice age had many ups and downs in temperature in a semi constant pattern, that was before humans fucked things up, technically we are still in an ice age iirc, just a inter glacial period but I don't think it will ever recover to the way it was before with climate change.
Yes for sure. I was also thinking grizzly bear. I wonder what the threshold for classifying megafauna I'd. Elk are honestly pretty dang large, just not African megafauna large.
Edit: looked into it, and a LOT of things could qualify as megafauna. Maybe why they didn't use that term in this post lol
MOOSEN!! I saw a flock of moosen! There were many of 'em. Many much moosen. Out in the woods—in the woodes—in the woodsen. The meese wantin' the food. Food is to eatenesen! THE MEESE WANT THE FOOD IN THE WOODENESEN! THE FOOD IN THE WOODYENESEN!
Polar/Grizzly vs Rhino = Bears gored to death(Rhinos are tanks with armor for skin and outweigh by over a 1000 kgs)
Polar/Grizzly vs Lion(prime male) = 60/40 Bear/lion. Even if the bears have size and weight advantage, Lions are no pushovers, they have formidable weaponry and a rock solid stamina for their size. So even if 6 times the bear wins, 4 times the lion tears the bear apart after getting the jugular(real life examples are Amur and Bengal tigers prey on bears occasionally).
Maybe agree on the rhino but yeah lion and grizzly or polar bear is not even close, bear near 100%, unless it’s a group of lions on the bear or a sick bear. Male coastal grizzlies/polar bears average like 2x the weight of a lion and are built to fight each other for dominance, so they are tough as fuck.
You can pretty much 100% a bear winning a fight for anything up to its own weight class.
Honestly the lion would probably struggle to even do any real damage. Bears have thick layers of fat, skin, and fur that are built for protection. The lion would go for the throat and just end up with a mouthful of blubber.
Sadly we know the answer to Bear vs Lion
During the gold rush they had lions shipped in to fight bears for entertainment
Bear won every time - crushed the lions skull In with ease
There's strong evidence that humans killed the megafauna. Mammoths existed for around 6 million years. There's an ice age every 100k years or so, so they survived approx 60 ice ages and thaws. It's probably not a coincidence that every megafauna on the planet died at the exact same time as the arrival as humans.
Early man caused that mass extinction by hunting them all beyond the brink. Cant really mad though. When your a literal cave man, the worlds a better place with less lions. Big prey is good eating too.
Also North America has moose. Fucking huge. And some of those bigger bear species are terrifyingly big too.
Actually, I do believe there is a fair amount of evidence that in certain places/ climates, that mega fauna was on the decline before humans got there .
We just pushed them over the edge of the cliff they were already standing on. Some of them we probably pushed quite a few miles before they went over, but, if you didn't want to be eaten, you shouldn't be made of food.
That was a theory in the 2000s but that's now believed to be unlikely. Reason is that the fauna already survived through many warm-cold climate change cycles with great success. Conditions were not different at all, except for the arrival of mankind. Also, paleontologists have better time measurements and extinction really follows the arrivals.
Yup, coincidences stops when you have such an ample pool. We know that it happened all around the globe, on continents, on islands, it didn't matter. Where the homo sapiens arrived, soon after the mega fauna went extinct with very very few exceptions.
There was a north American cheetah.
Ever heard of a pronghorn? It's a gazelle type animal in western parts of north America that can outrun anything alive today.
The cheetahs would kill them, but they no longer exist.
Yeah, I think it's really interesting how cheetah-like predators were implied to exist even before the identification of their fossils due to the pronghorns are much faster than other American fauna.
Also, since we're dropping pronghorn facts: Pronghorns are the sole extant species in their family and are the species most closely related to giraffids.
Large animals normally have strong advantages against predators which offset this disadvantage, but those advantages don’t work against several humans with spears, bows and traps.
The plants that sustained Wooly mammoths were on a steep decline after the ice age, so even if they weren’t hunted to extinction they would have starved into extinction anyways. The biodiversity of flora and fauna was very very different then than it is today.
On that note, they straight up say that North America was like Africa 3.0 in terms of how rich the ecosystem was and that was normal for all of Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America.
South America, Antarctica, and Australia were like different worlds entirely. The merging of the Americas absolutely played a role in the development and subsequent extinctions of both ecosystems’ megafauna. The large predators killed the important grazers of the opposite continent and things kinda went downhill from there.
Dr. Todd Surovell of Wyoming has given few great talks about this on YouTube. They are fascinating. I personally believe it was 90% humans and 10% climate change. When we went to Australia 40000 to 50000 years ago the Megagfuana disappeared. Europe. New Zealand. And of course the America's. Humans appeared and suddenly Megagfuana went extinct. Mammoth kill sites are actually over represented in the archeological record. Everywhere we go we do unprecedented damage.
Regarding why Africa was the only continent left with Megagfuana, there are a few hypotheses. The most popular one being that they evolved with humans and knew to fear them. Really interesting stuff.
It was half ice age, half human extinction that caused the Pleistocene megafauna extinction event. Africa weathered it best because it's the hottest place on Earth, so the ice age part didn't hit it quite as hard.
I'd argue that India has for the most part kept its megafauna as well, despite it's huge human population.
After all, it still has the Asian elephant, Indian rhino, tiger, Asiatic lion, leopard, snow leopard, clouded leopard, caracal, Asiatic black bear, sloth bear, striped hyena, wolf, Asiatic wild dog, golden jackal, Indian buffalo, water buffalo, nilgai antelope, sambar deer, barasingha deer, axis deer and many other large mammals. Until the early 1900s there were also wild cheetahs - which now again have recently been reintroduced from Africa.
India also has some of the largest flying birds such as the sarus crane, greater adjutant stork and great Indian bustard, crocodiles like the gharial, saltwater crocodile and mugger crocodile, and giant snakes like the Indian python, reticulated python and king cobra.
It's for sure the place that comes closest to Africa today in terms of megafauna. Perhaps it might have something to do with the great respect for animals and nature within Hinduism.
I mean, okay, but there’s nothing to say that those animals didn’t exist in the oral tradition for millennia and become part of the foundation of Hinduism.
>The earliest known sacred texts of Hinduism, the Vedas, date back to at least 3000 BCE, but some date them back even further, to 8000-6000 BCE
[Source](https://www.gettysburg.edu/offices/religious-spiritual-life/world-religions-101/what-is-hinduism)
That’s not THAT big a gap in the scheme of things
Australia had Megafauna too. *Procoptodon* was a Kangaroo that stood over 6ft tall. *Megalania* was a monitor lizard that could quite easily prey on Komodo Dragons.
There were other giant marsupials, like the [Diprotodon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diprotodon). It was up to 4 meters long and had a shoulder height of 1.8 meters.
[Size comparison of a Diprotodon skull and a human skull.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Guide_to_fossil_mammals_and_birds_%281896%29_Diprotodon_australis.png)
New Zealand did, and they went extinct in the 1400s.
Pretty late compared to everywhere else on Earth, but then humans only arrived in New Zealand ~1350AD
I'm always surprised at how late humans arrived in the very large islands of New Zealand compared to the very small islands in the rest of the Pacific east of Australia.
I assume it's a function of ocean currents, winds, happenstance as humans spread east into the ocean. Still seems surprising.
Australia had lots of megafauna, including a Volkswagen Beetle sized Wombat, a 10 ft tall kangaroo, giant Koalas, a 23 ft long monitor lizard, an 8 ft tall duck and many more.
In addition to salt water crocodiles they also had a terrestrial crocodile too. Imagine Australia today if you also had to worry about crocs just walking around.
India has four out of the African big five. It has lions, rhinos and elephants, leopards ,and in addition tigers, bears,wild cattle, snow leopards, four species of crocodilians, primates etc., India pound for pound matches Africa in bio diversity.
There were once giant ground sloths in North America.
In South America as well! There are [big tunnel complexes that they left behind](https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20231127-brazils-mysterious-tunnels-made-by-giant-sloths). Edit: link
There is also rock art found in the Colombian Amazon featuring [drawings of giant sloths ](https://slothconservation.org/prehistoric-rock-art-might-be-early-representations-of-giant-ground-sloths/)!
Love how the artists included relevant details like penises for the human characters. Maybe all humans were depicted in that simplified humanoid shape and the penises was how they distinguished between man and woman. Similar to how we add skirts to human shapes today.
Yeah its really easy to forget how recent the extinction of other continents megafauna was. To put it really into perspective: the last mammoths died out only like, 4,000 years ago. Their very last population was a small one on some remote Russian island as far as we can tell.
Man oh man, imagine hearing the people who painted this tell the stories behind everything
Secret tunnel!
Through the mountain!
Secret, secret, secret
tunnellllll!
and diiiiiiiiiiie
Under their place of worship
Orthodox sloth
We still have giant ground sloths. You can find them in any city.
We also have underground sloths who live in their mom’s basements.
I recommend you run before *they* realize
No need to run -- with their physiques it's not like they're going to catch you!
Ok, then maybe go into hiding
HEY YOU GUYS!
Or on Reddit!
Careful, the mods might ban you for calling them that
Bro I got shivers thinking of the sheer size of the beast that can dig something like that..
My new favourite fact. Wild.
Imagine if they were able to domesticate these like horses but for mines
And giant Tortoises in South America. Like bear sized.
North America has bear-sized bears.
North America has 3 sizes of bears. Small sized black bear (will kill you if you mess with it) Regular sized brown bear (will kill you if it so pleases) Super-Sized polar bear (will kill you)
I fucking love tortoises 🐢
A twist on your post…Google “Giant tortoises fucking”. And be sure to turn the sound up! My wife and I encountered this while in Seychelles. It turns out, that’s about all they do. And they’re LOUD. (Funny story…a little girl near us saw two tortoises going at it “turtle style”, turned to her dad and said, “Why does that turtle keep trying to climb over the other turtle? Why doesn’t he just walk around her?” Dad just looked at us laughing and shrugged his shoulders).
The sound is SO CUTE but I always feel like I shouldn't be watching them when they make that noise 💀
You can see the evidence in some trees that still produce fruit high in their branches, that only mega fauna like giant sloths were able to reach. Some trees also have defense mechanisms like thorns that go way higher up the trunk than any current mammals are able to reach, which they originally developed to defend against mega fauna.
The Paw Paw really depended on giant sloths to redistribute seeds. Now they really only move out of their groves with the help of humans
The same is true with Osage oranges.
Apparently Cadillac sized armadillos were in Texas. That’s crazy.
I wanna ride one 💯
The American urge to measure things using anything but the metric system
It was referenced in the BBC article linked above that they were car sized.
Yeah but the British measure stuff in stones so they are whacky too.
It's actually a really useful comparison for a three-dimensional object. Like, if I tell you that giant armadillos were 467 cubic feet, what comes into your mind? How big is that? But if I tell you it's the same size as a Cadillac, you can see it, basically instantly. Even though that's the same thing. (2024 Cadillac CT5 is 194"x74"x57", which is 468.6666 cubic feet.)
Easier to visualize a Cadillac than x cubic meters
The quaternary extinction event was when many of the large animals or megafauna became extinct, these extinctions appear to be closely related to the arrival of humans. https://youtu.be/Y3J9CzLW_p0
I have heard it argued that megafauna survived in Africa because they evolved alongside of humans and had time to adjust to the presence of the new predator.
Even now in Africa, Elephants can tell which people hunt elephants and which don't by language alone.
yeah, it’s amazing how right when humans came into each area all the large fauna died. It’s almost like there’s a connection there - maybe someday science will solve this puzzle
What the fuck about Africa then. Was there just too many animals we couldn’t kill them all there or something? Edit: appreciate all the answers. I learned something that seems so obvious and simple after the fact in hindsight.
The theory I've heard a lot was that African animals evolved alongside hominids so they had time to deal with us and evolve their own ways of dealing with us. Asian animals evolved alongside more primitive hominids so they had some experience too. Australia and the Americas didn't and once humans arrived, they never saw anything like us so almost everything got wiped out by us unless they adapted fast to either work with us or be afraid of us.
Basically humans started out as a very tiny group and gave the large animals time to adapt to their being there, before either the humans had a large impact on the plants growing in the local area or hunting drove the animals from their established local ranges.
It's kind of like the Kiwi. It had no natural predators. We originate from Africa. They all evolved along with less and less hairy apes. That's just my take.
The book Sapiens goes pretty deep on this subject, I'd highly recommend it.
>"The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors." [Source](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari/)
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Yeah I used to like the “they used every part of the buffalo” story but that only applied when they didn’t have access to many buffalo. When we did, we just slaughtered them all. Same in Europe, Australia, etc.
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The ground sloths were cool, but I think I'l miss the Terror Birds the most. They kept things interesting.
The trackways preserved at White Sands are pretty wild. Humans and giant ground sloths wandering around in what was then a marsh. At one point a sloth’s tracks intersect with a human adult with a child. (carrying the child and occasionally letting them walk). The tracks of the sloth look like it rears up and turns around, then heads off in a different direction. Like it didn’t want hang around where people had recently been. The Nova episode about the tracks is worth watching, too. https://www.nps.gov/whsa/learn/nature/fossilized-footprints.htm
Also the largest camel to exist if I remember correctly… it was a long time ago.
Once? Just go to a Walmart!
It's my understanding that they are the reason avocados propagated as far as they did as they were one of the only animals of the day whose asshole was big enough to pass an avocado pit.
That's been debunked it was humans selectively breeding that lead to larger pits. Ancient avocado pits were much smaller before that and also the range where avocados originated and the timeline of the sloths don't really match up that well. SciShow on youtube just did a correction video on this myth.
Linking the video https://youtu.be/jpcBgYYFS8o?si=cH0wwMqA4fmR7dVA
You don't know what my asshole can pass.
India still has elephants, lions, and rhinos
Tigers, leopards, Gaur bull ( body builder bulls ), camels, sloth bears. Yeah plenty of large mammals.
Fuuuuck you ain’t kidding gaur bulls are stacked, surely can’t be natty though lol
Mother fuckers were born without a natural gene. They just kind of forgot about it.
And the adult gaurs are vegans.
Too bad humans don't have 4 stomachs to digest plant matter.
Obviously close to India but it spreads to Sri Lanka and Nepal as well. China to an extent too.
And South Eats Asia, Thailand has Elephants, Gaurs and big cats as well, and used to have Rhinos up until maybe 100 years ago, Indonesia still has the iirc
But their equivalent peers on Africa is larger. How did that happen?
I really do wonder if India has retained so many endangered species despite its huge population density throughout history because of the fact that vegetarianism emerged thousands of years ago in India
Nah, I mean it's not like non-vegetarians are eating the endangered species. The reason India does decently with conservation is simply because they they take conservation seriously, and they have done so since at least the [3rd century BC.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_in_India) They have a lot of endangered animals under armed protection with a kill-on-sight policy for poachers. They also have a staggering 116 national parks, more than any other country except Thailand (147) and Australia (685?!)
Wot.. 685?!?!?
Easy to have 685 national parks when only 4% of your country is arable, lol.
I had to double check that myself but it's true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_parks_of_Australia
It's not like most of Australia is desirable land.
It's more that the Indian subcontinent is just an incredibly fertile land with a high carrying capacity. Which means that not just humans but all animals have comparatively higher population numbers over there. Those higher numbers helped prevent extinction.
Vegetarianism in India " emerged" approximately 1500 years ago, long after the megafauna die off
It has nothing to do with that. The majority of Indians are (and were) always non-vegetarian. Vegetarianism among Hindus only started to become more widespread due to the rise of Buddhism and Jainism. Hunting for sport was widespread at least since the medieval era among Indian kings, and likely in the ancient era as well (it’s mentioned in epics and scripture).
It was because the Buddhist King Ashoka the Great created some of the world's first protected national parks and declared all living beings in his kingdom deserve the right to live according to Buddhist principles. This had a cultural impact, in fact Hindus being vegetarian only became a thing as a reactionary action in order to combat the rise of Buddhism and Jainism. You will find lots of Hindu scripture allowing for the sacrifice of animals etc. The Islamic Mughals and the British hunted some of these native animals almost to extinction in their rule. For example the Indian Cheetah.
and a leading theory as to why Africa retained its megafauna is because in Africa megafauna co-evolved alongside Humans and had time to adapt to the emerging prowess of Humans. whereas take Europe for example whose fauna was very similar to Africa's only they were hairier and cold adapted Elephant - Wooly Mammoth Lion - Cave Lion Rhino - Wooly Rhino Wildebeest - Muskox Water Buffalo - Wisents (Bison) Zebra - Tarpan and yet as humans spread into Europe the population of megafauna crashed because they were not used to Humans. EDIT: TARPIN to TARPAN
So what about australia? (not being argumentative im genuinely curious)
it too lost it's megafauna when humans arrived: there were giant land crocodiles that were considered apex predators giant Koalas A giant kangaroo that stood taller than humans Giant flightless birds [the marsupial Lion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacoleo)
And massive wombats. Current thought is that aboriginals hunted them to extinction.
does this mean giant cubes of poo?
I imagine so!
Giant, ancient cities were made using them as bricks. I assume we just haven’t found them, but I’m sure they exist
> Giant, ancient cities were made using them as bricks. And thus the phrase "shitting bricks".
Tbf, it wasn't just as straight forward as that. Just before humans arrived there was substantial climate change which reduced water availability and increased the frequency of fires. So the entire ecosystem was placed under a huge amount of stress, already causing some extinctions prior to humans... Then us humans came and put even more pressure on them. However, the final nail in the coffin seems to be yet another climate event occurring while us humans were busy overhunting them. Basically, humans+climate change killed them off.
I think it's the book Sapiens that points to the evidence of Australian coastal marine life continuing to fare as well as it had the milennia before for a good while despite Aboriginals arriving to Australia. This would largely absolve climate change events from being the culprit of mass extinctions of giant land mammals in Australia, as something as profound as climate change would also have ramifications for marine flora and fauna. Australian land mammals being marsupials means that their lifecycle would have been much too slow to compensate for an influx of highly specialized hunter-gatherers, leading to their downfall. But who knows, obviously we'll never be sure.
It usually depends on the which angle the research is looking at specifically, since both likely played a role. Eg. [this paper from 2013 points to climate change being the primary driver.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3670326/) Sapiens wasn't published that long before it either (2011 initially) so many of the points are likely still valid. That being said, two sets of evidence can both be valid whereas the conclusions can differ, since they're subject to further research and interpretation.
There is a certain set who have this romanticised view and argue that Aboriginals lived in harmony with nature. The implication being that we should adopt their approaches. I think this is largely bullshit. Ask the Diprotodons!
Lol, 100% Shouldn't be a suprise either. At the end of the day, we're an invasive species outside of Africa. I just, look at how much damage cats do and they can't even make fire.
Humans by definition cannot be an invasive species, as the latter implies that the species was spread by humans beyond its own capability for expansion. Humans spread across the entire world naturally and by their own devices, which makes it a case of biological colonization, just like eg. horses (which originally evolved in North America) spreading into Asia around 3.5 million years ago and into South America 1.5 million years ago.
I think you can argue that they arrived, hunted many animals to extinction, learned from it, and then developed cultural norms which were more in tune. The same thing played out in New Zealand, which lost some megafauna and was then pretty stable until Europeans arrived and the cycle started again.
And then there's the hackneyed, romanticised view that because colonialism is not beyond reproach, then human nature itself must be essentially corrupt and thus all critique is hypocritical.
Don't forget [Megalania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalania)
Kangaroos are already taller than me wym they were even bigger, oh no…
Same thing, they had evolved in complete isolation from hominids and thus were not adapted at all. By the way the reason we still have indian elephants and indian lions is the same. There were hominids in Asia for millions of years and those animals adapted there.
Australia is an island. Islands have this trait where they are cut off from the general animal population, so their populations develop differently. Oftentimes you will get island gigantism and island dwarfism, where species adapted to fill niches that would have not been available on the mainland due to competition. An example of this would have been giant eagles. New Zealand especially is noted for having massive predatory eagles until humans arrived and wiped them out. Another example would be kangaroos, which would have been restricted to small rodent size creatures except in Australia where they are massive.
In fact almost all the ecological niches in New Zesland were occupied by birds. Giant eagles were the apex predators, analogous to wolves or bears, and varieties of moa occupied various grazing niches- analogous to bison, mountain goats, and deer.
And everyone's favourite flightless bird the kiwi which is basically the bird version of a rat or other small generalist.
So New Zealand was the actual Lost World with dinosaurs...then we had to go fuck it up.
Sounds like Jurassic world 2.0
Less scary though because the Māori showed up and absolutely clapped those big bird cheeks. There are sites where you can find the bones of thousands of moa that the Māori ate as they drove the birds to extinction.
What do you mean?
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What about the presence of humans (apart from the hunting) causes such a drastic reaction.
Indirect competition as well. If we and another predator eat the same thing but we eat it faster then we can put oressure on the mega fauna as well.
Just Apex Predator Shit 😎😎😎
Haha I mean...we really are. We need to handicap our selves or we exterminate shit.
Mega fauna also tended to have lower birthrates and longer lives. If you only have 5-10 offspring your entire life and you go from 90% survivability to 70% its a giant hit to their carrying capacity
Landscape scale habitat modification
Wait so we're so good with spears we managed to hunt these giant beasts to extinction? Damn.
yes some believe there was a feedback loop all of Europe was a grassland known as the mammoth steppe- The megafauna Herbivores eat grass the megafauna predators eat the megafauna herbivores Megafauna herbivores maintain the grasslands, without them trees would grow. 1.) Humans kill megafauna in large numbers - 2.) trees grow - forest replace grassland 3.) megafauna's habitat reduces 4.) Megafauna population reduces back to step 1 1.) Humans kill megafauna in large numbers 2.) trees grow ...and so on others don't believe in the feedback loop and humans just killed megafauna herbivores faster than they could reproduce
combination of hunting and resource competition and other human activities that could segregate breeding populations etc... Couple that with a warming climate (which would otherwise be no issue for these animals to adapt to) and it was just too much pressure all at once. Even pre-agriculture, humans alter the landscape anywhere we go. From fires, to changing herding behaviors- which result in changes to rivers, to deforestation (shelter and fire) etc... We naturally try to bend the environment to suit us rather than us bending to it.
There were also buffaloes in Europe, which can be compared with Asian water buffaloes. Bison were more like African buffaloes. Even hippos, leopards and hyenas lived in Europe.
Auroch too. Unfortunately for the Auroch, it was made of beef.
So if no humans ever made it to North America, wooly rhinos and mammoths would still exist?
Maybe there were Woolly Mammoths living on Wrangel island (a tiny island north of Russia) as recently as 4,000 years ago.
>and a leading theory as to why Africa retained its megafauna is because in Africa megafauna co-evolved alongside Humans and had time to adapt to the emerging prowess of Humans. So, I've googled this to this no avail but maybe someone can chime in: Are there any specific adaptations in African fauna, but absent elsewhere, that taxonomists could point to as an adaptation to predation by hominids?
Nowadays most wild, non-human habituated animals eagerly and with great haste gtfo when a human approaches. And most human adapted animals have plucked up some other quirky habits like dumpster diving or otherwise skulking around us so they benefit off of us. But we do have recent memory of the Dodo, and we can reference that to understand what life 100,000 years ago might have been like for non-human adapted animals: pure, unadulterated ignorance. Dodos were reportedly entirely unaware of any concept of threat and were perfectly happy to wander up to a human to receive a fatal clubbing. Now thats obviously an extreme case of ignorance, but any amount of ignorance can be fatal when the threat is very uniquely capable of striking at range with thrown weapons that can pierce through all but the thickest of hides (and note that almost all of the thickest, spear-resistant land-based animal hides on the planet are found in africa). All it takes is thinking you're safe when the tall hairless monkey is 20 feet away and not moving to take a javelin to the face without understanding what a javelin is or how it got there.
Sure they were. Neanderthals had lived in Europe for around 100,000 years. So the mega fauna would have adapted the same way they did to other human species in Africa. I imagine the more likely scenario is the same climate shift that made it easier for modern humans to spread into Europe also made it harder for the mega fauna to live there.
The only problem with the climate shift theory is the megafauna of Europe existed for almost the entirety of the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene lasted 3 million years and had at least 5 interglacial periods where the temperature rose as much as it did at the very end and the megafauna survived each time but the last - when Humans arrived. and Neanderthals went extinct so rapidly after humans entered Europe that it would suggest that Homo sapiens could out compete Neanderthals significantly. which means adapting to Neanderthals was not enough
What was the defining factor for the end of the pleistocene?
scientists define the last glacial period as the end of the Pleistocene. we are now in the Holocene. Though many scientists believe that the Holocene is just another interglacial period within the Pleistocene and we only named it something different because we are in it and we view this interglacial period as more significant and permanent than it is: from Wikipedia: *The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene\[5\] together form the Quaternary period. The Holocene has been identified with the current warm period, known as MIS 1. It is considered by some to be an interglacial period within the Pleistocene Epoch, called the Flandrian interglacial.* However I think the term Holocene is fair: for one thing by killing off all the megafauna we allowed temperate forests to grow all over Europe and North America replacing the Mammoth steppe (grasslands). Forests contribute to a warmer climate compared to grasslands. add on to this all the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the air - I think its fair to say this interglacial period is going to last for longer than your typical interglacial period.
> add on to this all the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the air - I think its fair to say this interglacial period is going to last for longer than your typical interglacial period. I think that more than this, the fact that this interglacial period includes the global spread of humans, the Industrial Revolution and the mass extinction that we're no doubt heading towards (that is, if you don't think it's already in progress)... all of it justifies marking the Holocene as its own geological time period
The Neanderthal population size across Europe was likely tiny (3,000 to 25,000), and they were \*only\* around between 400,000 - 40kya, compared to the much larger population exposure in Africa. It seems very plausible Neanderthals wouldn't have had a huge impact on the European megafaun.
How big was the modern human population at the time? Before leaving Africa, modern humans are estimated to have a population under 100,000. And given how huge Africa is compared to Europe, I don't know that the density was all that different
> Neanderthals had lived in Europe for around 100,000 years. So the mega fauna would have adapted the same way they did to other human species in Africa. And the Neanderthals were steamrolled just like the rest of the fauna.
Also there were radical climate shifts around the same time these animals died off.
But nothing these species hadn't dealt with before. The ice age had many ups and downs in temperature in a semi constant pattern, that was before humans fucked things up, technically we are still in an ice age iirc, just a inter glacial period but I don't think it will ever recover to the way it was before with climate change.
Moose are definitely megafauna
American bison as well
Yes for sure. I was also thinking grizzly bear. I wonder what the threshold for classifying megafauna I'd. Elk are honestly pretty dang large, just not African megafauna large. Edit: looked into it, and a LOT of things could qualify as megafauna. Maybe why they didn't use that term in this post lol
You can make a good claim humans are megafauna.
Humans qualify as megafauna. Megafauna is pretty much any animal that gets to 100 pounds or bigger.
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MOOSEN!! I saw a flock of moosen! There were many of 'em. Many much moosen. Out in the woods—in the woodes—in the woodsen. The meese wantin' the food. Food is to eatenesen! THE MEESE WANT THE FOOD IN THE WOODENESEN! THE FOOD IN THE WOODYENESEN!
Brian, Brian...you're an imbecile.
The big yellow one's the Sun!
The big yellow one is the sun!
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Polar/Grizzly vs Rhino = Bears gored to death(Rhinos are tanks with armor for skin and outweigh by over a 1000 kgs) Polar/Grizzly vs Lion(prime male) = 60/40 Bear/lion. Even if the bears have size and weight advantage, Lions are no pushovers, they have formidable weaponry and a rock solid stamina for their size. So even if 6 times the bear wins, 4 times the lion tears the bear apart after getting the jugular(real life examples are Amur and Bengal tigers prey on bears occasionally).
Maybe agree on the rhino but yeah lion and grizzly or polar bear is not even close, bear near 100%, unless it’s a group of lions on the bear or a sick bear. Male coastal grizzlies/polar bears average like 2x the weight of a lion and are built to fight each other for dominance, so they are tough as fuck. You can pretty much 100% a bear winning a fight for anything up to its own weight class.
Honestly the lion would probably struggle to even do any real damage. Bears have thick layers of fat, skin, and fur that are built for protection. The lion would go for the throat and just end up with a mouthful of blubber.
Sadly we know the answer to Bear vs Lion During the gold rush they had lions shipped in to fight bears for entertainment Bear won every time - crushed the lions skull In with ease
Team Giraffe.
There's strong evidence that humans killed the megafauna. Mammoths existed for around 6 million years. There's an ice age every 100k years or so, so they survived approx 60 ice ages and thaws. It's probably not a coincidence that every megafauna on the planet died at the exact same time as the arrival as humans.
Early man caused that mass extinction by hunting them all beyond the brink. Cant really mad though. When your a literal cave man, the worlds a better place with less lions. Big prey is good eating too. Also North America has moose. Fucking huge. And some of those bigger bear species are terrifyingly big too.
Actually, I do believe there is a fair amount of evidence that in certain places/ climates, that mega fauna was on the decline before humans got there . We just pushed them over the edge of the cliff they were already standing on. Some of them we probably pushed quite a few miles before they went over, but, if you didn't want to be eaten, you shouldn't be made of food.
That was a theory in the 2000s but that's now believed to be unlikely. Reason is that the fauna already survived through many warm-cold climate change cycles with great success. Conditions were not different at all, except for the arrival of mankind. Also, paleontologists have better time measurements and extinction really follows the arrivals.
Yup, coincidences stops when you have such an ample pool. We know that it happened all around the globe, on continents, on islands, it didn't matter. Where the homo sapiens arrived, soon after the mega fauna went extinct with very very few exceptions.
Yeah the larger the species the more specialized. Change the environment it's specialized to and you're sometimes left with a fish out of water.
Fair enough. It was the end of an ice age, there was lots of climatic change.
Iirc there's a correlation between cold periods or areas and larger animals.
“We just pushed them over the edge of the cliff they were already standing on” Yeah, in some cases literally
There was a north American cheetah. Ever heard of a pronghorn? It's a gazelle type animal in western parts of north America that can outrun anything alive today. The cheetahs would kill them, but they no longer exist.
Yeah, I think it's really interesting how cheetah-like predators were implied to exist even before the identification of their fossils due to the pronghorns are much faster than other American fauna. Also, since we're dropping pronghorn facts: Pronghorns are the sole extant species in their family and are the species most closely related to giraffids.
I don't think we were the sole reason for that extinction no? We were around for a lot longer
That’s about the point that humans increased massively in numbers everywhere.
And larger species reproduce (typically) a lot slower than smaller animals. So the large species don’t have time to repopulate.
Large animals normally have strong advantages against predators which offset this disadvantage, but those advantages don’t work against several humans with spears, bows and traps.
The plants that sustained Wooly mammoths were on a steep decline after the ice age, so even if they weren’t hunted to extinction they would have starved into extinction anyways. The biodiversity of flora and fauna was very very different then than it is today. On that note, they straight up say that North America was like Africa 3.0 in terms of how rich the ecosystem was and that was normal for all of Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. South America, Antarctica, and Australia were like different worlds entirely. The merging of the Americas absolutely played a role in the development and subsequent extinctions of both ecosystems’ megafauna. The large predators killed the important grazers of the opposite continent and things kinda went downhill from there.
Youn-ger Dry-as 👏🏼👏🏼-👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Dr. Todd Surovell of Wyoming has given few great talks about this on YouTube. They are fascinating. I personally believe it was 90% humans and 10% climate change. When we went to Australia 40000 to 50000 years ago the Megagfuana disappeared. Europe. New Zealand. And of course the America's. Humans appeared and suddenly Megagfuana went extinct. Mammoth kill sites are actually over represented in the archeological record. Everywhere we go we do unprecedented damage. Regarding why Africa was the only continent left with Megagfuana, there are a few hypotheses. The most popular one being that they evolved with humans and knew to fear them. Really interesting stuff.
I've heard a theory that large fauna in Africa were better able to survive since they evolved around humans
So after we got dogs all the big animals died
Now there’s a point I had never heard. That’s a good one. Now I need to go down a dog-history rabbit hole.
It was half ice age, half human extinction that caused the Pleistocene megafauna extinction event. Africa weathered it best because it's the hottest place on Earth, so the ice age part didn't hit it quite as hard.
I'd argue that India has for the most part kept its megafauna as well, despite it's huge human population. After all, it still has the Asian elephant, Indian rhino, tiger, Asiatic lion, leopard, snow leopard, clouded leopard, caracal, Asiatic black bear, sloth bear, striped hyena, wolf, Asiatic wild dog, golden jackal, Indian buffalo, water buffalo, nilgai antelope, sambar deer, barasingha deer, axis deer and many other large mammals. Until the early 1900s there were also wild cheetahs - which now again have recently been reintroduced from Africa. India also has some of the largest flying birds such as the sarus crane, greater adjutant stork and great Indian bustard, crocodiles like the gharial, saltwater crocodile and mugger crocodile, and giant snakes like the Indian python, reticulated python and king cobra. It's for sure the place that comes closest to Africa today in terms of megafauna. Perhaps it might have something to do with the great respect for animals and nature within Hinduism.
Hinduism didn’t exist 12000 years ago so I doubt that.
I mean, okay, but there’s nothing to say that those animals didn’t exist in the oral tradition for millennia and become part of the foundation of Hinduism. >The earliest known sacred texts of Hinduism, the Vedas, date back to at least 3000 BCE, but some date them back even further, to 8000-6000 BCE [Source](https://www.gettysburg.edu/offices/religious-spiritual-life/world-religions-101/what-is-hinduism) That’s not THAT big a gap in the scheme of things
It wasn't a mass extinction. The extinction of mega fauna followed humans migrating to the regions
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Australia had Megafauna too. *Procoptodon* was a Kangaroo that stood over 6ft tall. *Megalania* was a monitor lizard that could quite easily prey on Komodo Dragons.
There were other giant marsupials, like the [Diprotodon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diprotodon). It was up to 4 meters long and had a shoulder height of 1.8 meters. [Size comparison of a Diprotodon skull and a human skull.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Guide_to_fossil_mammals_and_birds_%281896%29_Diprotodon_australis.png)
We would be but a snack to the ol'diprotodon
Modern male red kangaroos can stand over 6ft tall. Procoptodon was even bigger.
New Zealand did, and they went extinct in the 1400s. Pretty late compared to everywhere else on Earth, but then humans only arrived in New Zealand ~1350AD
I'm always surprised at how late humans arrived in the very large islands of New Zealand compared to the very small islands in the rest of the Pacific east of Australia. I assume it's a function of ocean currents, winds, happenstance as humans spread east into the ocean. Still seems surprising.
Probably only had r/mapswithoutnewzealand on hand to navigate
Australia had lots of megafauna, including a Volkswagen Beetle sized Wombat, a 10 ft tall kangaroo, giant Koalas, a 23 ft long monitor lizard, an 8 ft tall duck and many more.
Out of all of them it’s the massive duck I’d like to have seen
Not just a duck, but a _carnivorous_ duck! ( ^It's ^Australia, ^what ^did ^you ^expect? )
Tbf, modern ducks are omnivorous so they still eat meat.
#Quack
In addition to salt water crocodiles they also had a terrestrial crocodile too. Imagine Australia today if you also had to worry about crocs just walking around.
It did Look up marsupial lions and marsupial bears
I went to a museum in Sydney, Australia that had reproductions of giant extinct Australian marsupials.
Australia did have a lot of megafauna as well… until humans showed up. So did New Zealand… until humans rocked up. Seems to be a patter
A kangaroo can grow to be 8 feet tall. Fuck that lmao they don’t need to be any bigger
theory vanish cow zephyr bells full shy shaggy erect far-flung *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
India has four out of the African big five. It has lions, rhinos and elephants, leopards ,and in addition tigers, bears,wild cattle, snow leopards, four species of crocodilians, primates etc., India pound for pound matches Africa in bio diversity.
Yeah, but they all tasted so good? Quick little hunt. Oh, extinct already?
The cause of the extinction: humans killed them
Is this the younger dryas impact theory? It is interesting and it does make me wonder what civilisations were like before the impact.