Posted on 06/12/2012 7:03:32 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Ever try to keep track of your horses before you have fences?
Trust me there were already wild horses in North America within a decade of the first landings on the continent (in Mexico), and certainly there were horses in the offshore islands first settled by European.
We have an ancient group of ponies at Assateague and Chincoteague islands in Virginia ~ which are easily traced to 1600 and probably earlier.
The pirates who sailed the Spanish Maine were headquartered in Chesapeake Bay in the 1500s. There were Spanish settlements here. By 1598 the Spanish made it to Santa Fe New Mexico on horses that'd been born in America of lines that'd been here upwards of 75 years.
Never fear, Indians knew how to steal and the Comanche had Spanish horses available to them when they still lived in Montana!
De Soto brought HUNDREDS of horses with him for his expedition to the limits if LA Florida ~ including to the great inland sea (Lake Michigan). Some of them got away. Actually almost all of them got away!
Actually, I’m becoming convinced that man DID wipe out the mammoth!
They used the tools and techniques they developed back when we wiped out that T-Rex scourge!
They had a very efficient way to hunt them - they just drove herds of them off of cliffs.
I had no idea buffalo had that kind of vertical leap though.
Great example. Human knowledge may have been smaller thousands of years ago, but human ingenuity was not.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that things like asteroid impacts, ice ages, etc, caused some extinctions. Like I said to another poster, though, just because you can find evidence of one thing causing some extinctions, doesn’t mean it or a similar event caused all of them. An asteroid could account for some extinctions in North America, and man could still be responsible for other extinctions. History’s too complex to say either asteroids or men caused them all.
Well, I agree with that. And no doubt, man HAS BEEN involved in some extinctions.
But when I read reports of them finding yet another mammoth frozen in the permafrost of Siberia (in quite good physical shape, I might add(, well I KNOW man wasn’t responsible for like killing them and freezing them. If a man or men had done it, we’d see bones, not intact animals.
And the sheer NUMBER of samples MUST lead us to conclude that whatever happened, it was an extraordinary, Earth-changing event.
Combine that with the fact that a large number of other mega-fauna went extinct in the same period, you simply can’t get there with some ideas about hungry hunters. Even really good, experienced hunters.
And something I should point out that argues AGAINST the comet theory is that not all of the frozen samples they find come from the same time, fairly recent specimens are found, yet there have been specimens from 30,000 years ago.
But no matter what, I end up coming to the same conclusion that although early man DID hunt them, with a modicum of success, whatever caused their decline and extinction was something else. Perhaps something we don’t even know about yet.
“I doubt that a mammoth ate a thousand times more than a buffalo or that buffalo are not dangerous.”
Mammoth don’t need to eat a thousand times more than a bison for there to be thousands of bison for each mammoth in a similar size region. They are different animals, with different niches, so a direct comparison by amount of food they ate is useless. Also, bison roamed in huge herds all together, while mammoths were more territorial, living in small herds and fighting each other for turf. The thousand figure I threw out is just a guestimate anyway, so don’t get too hung up on it. The point is, there were a hell of a lot more bison, so you could kill a lot more of them before you made a significant impact on the population.
As for the danger, I didn’t say they were not dangerous, just not very dangerous to humans. That is, of course, unless you are stupid enough to stand in front of them when they are stampeding. Bison might have big horns that can kill you easily, but they are ruminants and ruminants are not a threat to humans under normal circumstances, they are a beneficial resource. Mammoths wouldn’t be as big of a threat as a large predator, but they certainly were more dangerous than some souped up cattle. I’ve never heard of a “rogue bison” going out and killing humans for fun, but elephants do display that behavior from time to time.
I don’t know what happened to the ice age bisons. Maybe the little guys just out competed them? Sometimes nature is counterintuitive. The big, more dangerous looking creature also needs more food, and is going to be more sensitive to a change in the food supply.
“The megafauna were not hunted to extinction over centuries, period.”
Well, I thought we were just talking about the mammoths, who did go extinct over centuries. What happened to the great number of species in North America was probably something different, though I would bet that humans helped every way they could if they had the opportunity.
Another thing to think about, is that some extinction events that might seem sudden could still be due to humans, since we’re working off the geological record, which is incomplete and imprecise. If it took humans a century or two to wipe out some large species on a continent, which wouldn’t be that unfathomable, it could still seem sudden in terms of fossils disappearing from the record.
Interesting point. I read an article years ago in a western magazine that some horses in the west showed a curly hair pattern found in RUSSIAN horses. Maybe we should look to the Russians for some of the original mustangs in the US.
If the most significant cause was an extraterrestrial object, then the smaller animals would have been more likely to be able to hide and be protected from the effects. I think that this is why the reptiles which survived the great dinosaur extinction event were snakes, turtles, crocodiles and others which lived in the water or underground; also, of course, our small mammalian ancestors.
Regarding a comment from SC, I was referring to underwater structures, not underwater wrecked shipping.
What I replied was, the underwater structures won’t be looked for until academic thinking gets comfortable with PreColumbian voyagers and starts to examine ancient wrecks, like the amphorae-laden Roman- or Greek-era wreck found decades ago off Brazil.
I thought Ballard was doing some exploration of the coast of Texas. Any word on that?
There’s an FR topic about that, two? years old.
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