From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Apr 17 2003 - 21:03:56 MDT
At 06:36 PM 4/17/03 -0400, Gordon Somebody (?) wrote:
>I would disagree
>adamantly with Diamond if he really suggests in his books that the hunting
>of animals to extinction was a "destructive tendency" of hungry paleolithic
>peoples who didn't know better
An argument is made by some that the extinction of the megafauna in
Australia coincided with the arrival of humans, and that this is not a
coincidence. On the one hand, perhaps climate change drove both events. On
the other, perhaps the newly arrived humans did not *destructively hunt
them all down and kill them*. Rather, they set fires that accidentally
ripped through the dry landscape and destroyed the prevailing ecology quite
quickly, zapping the larger marsupials. This evolved eventually into a
commensal arrangement of firestick farming or landscape management
developed across millennia, sustaining the emergent ecological balance;
with the arrival of Europeans two centuries ago this was interrupted, the
regular burn-offs stopped, leading to appalling conflagrations today (akin
to those that devastate wealthy Californian zones that once burned more
frequently). The trouble with this second model, it seems to me, is that
lightning strikes set plenty of fires anyway, so there must have been a
climatic change newly conducing to widespread tinderbox conditions.
Damien Broderick
[not to be confused with Damien Sullivan, the prodigious poster to this
topic]
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