Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Some experts when pointing to the decline of megafauna instinctively point the finger at human interaction as the cause. After all, they point out, don’t we find human spear points buried in the bones of long dead mammoths?

When real data is consulted, it turns out that the climate is the culprit, at least in Australia.

(Source: Peter Schouten/UNSW)

There is no evidence to support the idea that humans were primarily responsible for wiping out the extraordinary gigantic animals that once roamed Australia, says a group of Australian and US scientists…

The paper’s authors say there is only firm evidence for about 8 to 14 megafauna species still existing when Aboriginal people arrived. Another 50 species were completely absent from the fossil record of the past 130,000 years…

“There is very strong evidence that climate had a major role in the extinction process, and we have no evidence that humans had a major impact,” says study author Judith Field, an archaeologist from the University of NSW.

Since we have had so much climate research here in the US, would it be possible to perform a study along the same lines and put this controversy to bed already?

Have a great day.

The theory that the Americas were populated by peoples from Asia over the Bering Land Bridge may have some support. Not that these were the only people that made the journey, but a news report details:

“Geologists and geophysicists have discovered traces of large ice sheets from the Pleistocene on a seamount off the north-eastern coast of Russia, confirming for the first time that within the past 800,000 years in the course of ice ages, ice sheets more than a kilometer thick also formed in the Arctic Ocean.”

The evidence indicates that these enormous ice sheets didn’t only form on the continents, but also in the oceans, except during the height of the last ice age (21,000 BP.)
The results are from a seamount north of Wrangel Island in Russian waters, northwest of the Bering Straits.

While obviously more research is necessary to talk about the extent of the Arctic Ocean ice sheets, the possibility exists that earlier Ice Ages provided a path to the Americas, not just during the last Ice Age. Another possibility is that the sheets of ice might have also provided access from either side of the continent. After all, doesn’t the Arctic Ocean touch the Atlantic and Pacific?

Have a great day.