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An example of mankind's hubris goes down the drain
Topic Started: Jul 14 2017, 02:11 PM (771 Views)
kusanagi
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Flisch
Jul 29 2017, 07:12 AM
Little
Jul 28 2017, 07:59 PM
Let's not place all the blame on the pre-European societies. It wasn't them who drove dodos, Cylindraspis and others to extinction.
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.
A lot of anthropogenic impact on islands and even Australia was via introduced species not overhunting: pigs in Polynesia and dingos in Australia, later Europeans brought goats to localities such as Round Island. Humans didn't overhunt the dodo it was rats and pigs. Its not overhunting as dramatic as such images might be, and people are prone to put direct violence such as hunting into a moral context. People's choice of emphasis reveals things psychological, which are buttons people can press to steer them in a certain direction.

Same with human interactions as with ecology and the environment; Europeans are blamed for slave raiding (violence) when slaves were acquired by transatlantic trade, people talk about coercive rubber slavery in the Peruvian Amazon when servitude was by debt bondage (Indians were not abducted by violence). Overemphasis upon themes of violence, direct coercion or aggression is a tell a narrative is dishonest to push an agenda emotively and concisely. Oftentimes left wing sounding narratives serve the right when you scratch the surface: exoneration of the West's environmental impact, the human costs of global capitalism and the menace of debt to those who cannot escape its vicious cycle. Pseudohistory is not all ancient astronauts and what look like benevolent narratives actually suck in people with good intentions.

Anyway overkill does not work for all island situations, what happened on island ecosystems is a poor fit for the continental Pleistocene, and the timing and pattern of continental and island extinctions is often wrong.
Edited by kusanagi, Jul 29 2017, 08:55 AM.
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LittleLazyLass
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Scrublord
Jul 28 2017, 08:06 PM
Never said that they did, did I?
Not exactly, but you said that pre-Europeans drove all sorts of species extinct, but the Galapagos fauna survived because only the Europeans got there in the 16th century (lines up well with Mauritius, doesn't it?). I felt this kind of implied that.
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Steampunk FireFinch
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Things like these are why I'm glad species thought to be extinct have been found not only exist in the form of paintings or museum specimens or dead in the home of a private collecter. Like that one antpitta species in Peru and the Blue-eyed Ground-dove somewhere in Brazil.
Edited by Steampunk FireFinch, Jul 29 2017, 09:26 AM.
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Flisch
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kusanagi
Jul 29 2017, 08:01 AM
Flisch
Jul 29 2017, 07:12 AM
Little
Jul 28 2017, 07:59 PM
Let's not place all the blame on the pre-European societies. It wasn't them who drove dodos, Cylindraspis and others to extinction.
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.
A lot of anthropogenic impact on islands and even Australia was via introduced species not overhunting: pigs in Polynesia and dingos in Australia, later Europeans brought goats to localities such as Round Island. Humans didn't overhunt the dodo it was rats and pigs. Its not overhunting as dramatic as such images might be, and people are prone to put direct violence such as hunting into a moral context. People's choice of emphasis reveals things psychological, which are buttons people can press to steer them in a certain direction.
I used hunting as only one example. Note that I also listed agriculture as a reason among others for the extinction of locally restricted fauna.
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CryperVilla
Jul 28 2017, 08:14 PM
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Jul 28 2017, 08:10 PM
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Scrublord
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Little
Jul 29 2017, 09:04 AM
Not exactly, but you said that pre-Europeans drove all sorts of species extinct, but the Galapagos fauna survived because only the Europeans got there in the 16th century (lines up well with Mauritius, doesn't it?). I felt this kind of implied that.
I should have been more specific. The big difference between the Galapagos and Mauritius was that Mauritius was an island with an benign environment that could easily be settled. It had forests that could be used for lumber, plenty of rain to irrigate sugarcane crops, and warm, shallow, lagoons that could be fished. From the perspective of the Europeans who set up shop there, it was the quintessential "tropical paradise."
The Galapagos Islands, on the other hand, are dry, rocky, and desert-covered. No crops could grow there, and there was no room to raise farm animals. The Polynesians, who may have gotten as far as South America, presumably passed them over for that reason, since they were much less hospitable than the lush tropical islands they traditionally lived on. The Europeans did likewise, never fully settling the islands. The Galapagos ecosystem basically survived because it was too inhospitable for the Polynesians or the Europeans.

As for the land-dwelling crocodiles of New Caledonia, those went extinct about 4,000 years ago, right around the time humans reached the island.
Edited by Scrublord, Jul 30 2017, 04:58 PM.
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kusanagi
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Lord Howe? Aldabra? These islands had Holocene extinctions without human discovery.
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Scrublord
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Just because there's no evidence that humans were there when those extinctions happened doesn't mean they never came. Perhaps some seafarers arrived on the island but, after deciding it was too small to settle on, just killed all the animals they could find to stock up on food and then left.
Or perhaps--given how tiny Lord Howe and Aldabra are-- a freak tsunami or drought would have been enough to do the job.
Edited by Scrublord, Jul 30 2017, 05:14 PM.
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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.
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kusanagi
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I asked Roger Blench and Howe and Aldabra have no archaeological records. Those islands are however a cautionary tale not to ignore climate change as an alternative to or accelerator of Holocene and late Pleistocene extinction.

Actually a few species (grey fox, puma, jaguar) disappeared from North America when the climate warmed at the end of the Pleistocene only to return when it warmed even further, when Europeans were in the medieval period. Climate affects fauna sometimes in unpredictable ways.
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