Posted on 12/10/2011 8:32:01 AM PST by SunkenCiv
After reading that I could take nothing he wrote seriously.
You are misreading him. In this sentence he is describing the plot of a movie. He may very well believe in AGW, but you can't deduce it from his description of a movie.
The notion of early man as a Typhoid Mary causing mass extinctions is a new one to me. But it sounds like a load of bull. As the author says, disease organisms are usually too exquisitely adapted to their hosts to jump to multiple species.
I agree that early man and his diseases causing animal extinctions is BS. Something not yet understood happened to cause the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions. Eventually we'll probably figure it out but pontificating on the basis of present evidence is pointless.
Silly scientists.
The Ebola outbreaks themselves showed why this scenario is highly implausible. The organisms caused extreme death rates in a short time, but in the process "burned through" their available hosts and then, as an inevitable results, died themselves. This is despite the fact that the areas in question had only minimal medical resources.
With modern human technology, a highly deadly disease could spread fast enough to stay ahead of its own killing of its hosts, but probably not otherwise.
Also, I can see how humans could pick up diseases from the mammoths they killed, but fail to see how mammoths could be infected by humans. Surely they weren't in any kind of close contact on a regular basis. Which is how we acquired most of our infectious diseases by transmission from our domesticates.
© National Maritime Museum, London
Repro ID: H6324
Description: Dock officials check a consignment of ivory at London Docks. The ivory warehouse at Wapping was one of the most dazzling sights of the port. The ivory was weighed, examined, classified and laid out for the inspection of the buyers who in due time would arrange for it to be transformed into piano keys, billiard balls and countless other luxury items.
Creator: Illustrated London News. Date: 1873 Credit line: National Maritime Museum, London
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