Kill all the brutes

 

"Mystery of the Ice Giants" is a German documentary about the relatively sudden disappearence of the Paleolithic megafauna at the end of the "Ice Age". Was it due to naturally occuring climate change? Or did humans hunt the mammoths and other megafaunal species to extinction? The film team follows a group of paleontologists as they trek around the world, trying to shade some light on the mystery. White Sands in New Mexico, the Yukon in Canada and Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic are visited. The culprit is soon identified: yes, it was Stone Age human hunters. 

The megafauna had already survived several periods of severe climate change. When a glacial period ended, the so-called mammoth steppe where most of the megafauna lived shrank considerably, replaced by huge forests. However, the animals dependent on a steppe habitat simply moved to the few refugia where such an environment still existed, staging a comeback when the interglacial was over and the steppes became great again. Why didn´t this happen again at the end of the latest glaciation? The new factor simply must be Homo sapiens. At Dolne Vestonice, virtual "mass graves" filled with mammoth bones (usually from young specimens) have been found. There is also evidence from North America that humans hunted ground sloths and cave bears. Personally, I was fascinated by the Yukon, where the paleontologists can simply pick up fossils as they walk around the riverside, including well preserved mammoth tusks! 

Mammoths were hunted for the meat, but also for the fat, apparently a necessity in a cold climate with very little plant-based food available Over 60% of the food intake of Paleolithic humans was mammoth meat. One of the scientists featured speculate that the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers in Europe were dark-skinned (they were originally from Africa, after all) and therefore couldn´t produce enough vitamin D naturally from the sun light. This made it even more necessary to hunt mammoths, presumably to harvest the fatty tissue. (I suppose somebody somewhere might find it uncomfortable that Blacks and the ancestors of the American Indians were behind the first mass extinction in human history, but there you go.) 

When mammoths and other large herbivores were gone, the carnivores preying on them also went extinct. The sabre-toothed tiger known as smilodon was evidently specially adapted to hunt and kill such animals. With them gone, the weird-looking feline with its huge canines (sorry, couldn´t help myself) was doomed. Climate change also played a role, however. What made the impact of human hunters extra severe was that the end of "the Ice Age" reversed the climate yet again, dramatically shrinking the traditional grazing and hunting grounds of the megafauna. A few mammoths actually survived in Siberia, but where stuck on Wrangel Island when sea levels rose, eventually starving to death when food sources got scarce. 

But I´m sure "primitive" peoples have something important to teach us about "conservation ethics", right? Right.  

Environmental destruction began during the Stone Age.