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| An example of mankind's hubris goes down the drain | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 14 2017, 02:11 PM (772 Views) | |
| Carlos | Jul 14 2017, 02:11 PM Post #1 |
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Adveho in me Lucifero
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http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/easter-islanders-ecological-disaster-05033.html |
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Lemuria: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/ Terra Alternativa: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/forum/460637/ My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Carliro ![]() | |
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| Yiqi15 | Jul 14 2017, 02:39 PM Post #2 |
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Prime Specimen
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The article itself never mentions any theories put fourth on what really caused the Easter Island Collapse. Maybe it was a drought. |
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| LittleLazyLass | Jul 14 2017, 02:43 PM Post #3 |
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Proud quilt in a bag
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So Europeans saw a different culture and just kind of assumed they were primitive. Surprise? |
totally not British, b-baka! You like me (Unlike)I don't even really like this song that much but the title is pretty relatable sometimes, I guess. Me What, you want me to tell you what these mean? Read First Words Maybe | |
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| Carlos | Jul 14 2017, 03:06 PM Post #4 |
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Adveho in me Lucifero
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Yes, actually. It's amazing how far chauvinism goes. |
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Lemuria: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/ Terra Alternativa: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/forum/460637/ My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Carliro ![]() | |
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| Dragonthunders | Jul 14 2017, 04:16 PM Post #5 |
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The ethereal archosaur in blue
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I do not think there is a need for it, the article only has the purpose of transmitting what the research has discovered and its repercussions to the most accepted theory, it is possible that there will be speculation and theories in the future, but have to mention it seems unecessary, at least to me. |
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| CaledonianWarrior96 | Jul 14 2017, 04:49 PM Post #6 |
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An Awesome Reptile
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I remember seeing this on IFLScience. I commented suggesting maybe limiting contributions to the population's gene pool over the 600 - 700 year period of living on the island lead to degradation of their DNA as more closely related individuals began to breed and resulted in genetic defects which may have been one of the final nails in the coffin. Maybe not the definite cause and this is only my guess, but it doesn't seem to far fetched if you think about it |
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| bloom_boi | Jul 14 2017, 06:56 PM Post #7 |
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What The?
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The island is a treeless plain... A change in their perceived diet and reevaluation of their agricultural practices doesn't mean they did not cause ecological disaster. Rather it shows that human societies are much more resilient and adaptable to the damages they cause than first thought. This article is borderline misleading. The title has nothing to do with the contents or the studies used as source. |
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"You shall perish, whatever you do! If you are taken with arms in your hands, death! If you beg for mercy, death! Whichever way you turn, right, left, back, forward, up, down, death! You are not merely outside the law, you are outside humanity. Neither age nor sex shall save you and yours. You shall die, but first you shall taste the agony of your wife, your sister, your sons and daughters, even those in the cradle! Before your eyes the wounded man shall be taken out of the ambulance and hacked with bayonets or knocked down with the butt end of a rifle. He shall be dragged living by his broken leg or bleeding arm and flung like a suffering, groaning bundle of refuse into the gutter. Death! Death! Death!" | |
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| kusanagi | Jul 21 2017, 10:17 AM Post #8 |
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Adolescent
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People are scouring the globe for examples of indigenous environmental collapses as though it exonnerates recent centuries of Western culture from being uniquely destructive. You can put overkill theories into that politicised category as I was informed pro-Western activists are pushing that angle deliberately the same as they do the Solutrean hypothesis. In any case it is very simplified view to compare subsistence economies with the profit driven, postcapitalist world system. Western wastefulness is still part of how the West broke away from world norms in the early modern and industrial periods regardless of Rapa Nui or Madagascar or a few mass drive kills on the US plains.
Edited by kusanagi, Jul 29 2017, 08:56 AM.
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| Scrublord | Jul 28 2017, 07:48 PM Post #9 |
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Father Pellegrini
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Or Hawaii, or New Zealand, or New Caledonia, or the Caribbean, or. . . You know what, look at it this way: out of all the world's major island groups, the only one that still has its original ecosystem mostly intact is the Galapagos. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Galapagos never had a human population before they were discovered by Europeans in the late 16th century. Because humans arrived on the Galapagos relatively recently and took a long time to establish themselves, most of the native wildlife there still exists. If you want a real example of how a low-tech subsistence culture can wreck an ecosystem, just look at Hawaii. By the time Europeans reached the Hawaiian Islands, the Polynesians had already been living there for centuries, and most of their large native animals were already extinct. The island's largest native herbivores, giant flightless ducks called moa-nalos, went extinct as early as 1000 AD, as did four ground-dwelling owls, a harrier, over twenty honeycreepers, and several large geese. When first European explorers laid eyes on the forests of Hawaii, they were already looking at a devastated ecosystem. The story was the same in New Zealand (which lost its moas), Fiji (which lost its land-dwelling crocodiles), and New Caledonia (which lost its giant tortoises and megapodes). Europeans never even got a chance to see those animals. Edited by Scrublord, Jul 28 2017, 08:05 PM.
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My Projects: The Neozoic Redux Valhalla--Take Three! The Big One Deviantart Account: http://elsqiubbonator.deviantart.com In the end, the best advice I could give you would be to do your project in a way that feels natural to you, rather than trying to imitate some geek with a laptop in Colorado. --Heteromorph | |
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| Rodlox | Jul 28 2017, 07:54 PM Post #10 |
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Superhuman
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i assume you use "ott" as "over the top". please define these "world norms" in the context of peoples who go to war both because they ran out of pigs, and their neighbors still have pigs, or in the context of a continent's megafauna (and then some) going bye-bye. |
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.---------------------------------------------. Parts of the Cluster Worlds: "Marsupialless Australia" (what-if) & "Out on a Branch" (future evolution) & "The Earth under a still sun" (WIP) | |
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| LittleLazyLass | Jul 28 2017, 07:59 PM Post #11 |
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Proud quilt in a bag
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Let's not place all the blame on the pre-European societies. It wasn't them who drove dodos, Cylindraspis and others to extinction. |
totally not British, b-baka! You like me (Unlike)I don't even really like this song that much but the title is pretty relatable sometimes, I guess. Me What, you want me to tell you what these mean? Read First Words Maybe | |
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| Scrublord | Jul 28 2017, 08:06 PM Post #12 |
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Father Pellegrini
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Never said that they did, did I? |
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My Projects: The Neozoic Redux Valhalla--Take Three! The Big One Deviantart Account: http://elsqiubbonator.deviantart.com In the end, the best advice I could give you would be to do your project in a way that feels natural to you, rather than trying to imitate some geek with a laptop in Colorado. --Heteromorph | |
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| opeFool | Jul 28 2017, 08:14 PM Post #13 |
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Adolescent
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What is that? (Also, by what year were land-dwelling crocs dead by?) |
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Xipetotec | Mbio Bila Mshindi | Diarios California Quotes
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| kusanagi | Jul 29 2017, 05:41 AM Post #14 |
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Adolescent
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Island ecosystems were a poor match for continental ones, and modernity created or exaggerated environmental pressures. Even in European history the Basques did not wreak havoc upon cetacean populations the way industrial whaling did. This brings up an important point that prior to the modern period there are only five possible anthropogenic extinctions of non-flying marine tetrapods and two of those are contested because of long coexistence with man and coincidental climate change. The others, a Pacific giant eider and two Sardinian otters, are insufficiently known. All definite seabird extinctions are island nesting procellariformes and therefore subject to the same pressures as other island fauna, Austronesian pigs being the greatest threat to tubenoses rather than islanders themselves. On land the passenger pigeon and bison were exterminated and decimated as were sea mammals at sea, mostly for resources for industrial civilisation such as food for grand scale fur farming. As the USA was not heavily involved in whaling she takes the credit for saving the whale, but she led the most extreme depredations on land with machine gunners harvesting wild stocks to fuel industry. It isn't just technology but population pressure and philosophies about nature. These things are a historical fact, but people politicise island and Pleistocene extinction as though they are some parallel, when they are not. And people forget there were island extinctions on Aldabra and Lord Howe before Europeans were the first to settle on the islands. The Holocene was not stable and island ecosystems are fragile, which makes it all the more poignant that there was a long coexistence between man and megafauna on some Mediterranean islands and pre-Austronesian Madagascar. There is something very wrong with the analogy of Holocene islands to either modernity or the Pleistocene continents, the overkill model even for islands oversimplifies the diversity of native economies and island ecologies, makes inductive assumptions based on such generalisations, and is selective with data. Edited by kusanagi, Jul 29 2017, 05:48 AM.
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| Flisch | Jul 29 2017, 07:12 AM Post #15 |
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Superhuman
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I'm not sure blame is the right word anyway. Most animals, especially on island ecosystems, were driven extinct by people who simply tried to survive. They were in an environment they didn't evolve in, often used agriculture, which was potentially damaging to the local ecologies and simply didn't have the knowledge we have today. It's easy to say "How could they hunt these animals to extinction?" but for the longest time in human history it was thought that making species extinct was literally impossible. Humans are a very destructive species that's true, but until modern understanding of the world came about, humans were simply victims of their own success. |
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