Comments

Is this really news? So many megafauna went extinct in North America at the time that humans became widespread, just after the end of the last Ice Age. Those megafauna -- giant bison twice as large as today's bison, mastadons, mammoths, giant sloths, dire wolves, sabre tooth cats, various camelids and horses, for starters -- survived previous ice ages, and survived this last one, but then disappeared pretty quickly after the ice age was over. There were ice age drawings of rhinos and lions in Europe. If these and other large animals could survive the ice ages, why couldn't they survive warmer climates with more prey? For a while there were theories trying to show how diseases or changing climate or other things might have done the trick, but it really only takes steady hunting pressure over the centuries. And now we're at it again. This time it is the commercial and perhaps the complete extinction of so many ocean species, as well as the threats to the more well known land species. Tigers and orangutans and rhinos in the not too distant future may survive only in zoos, if they don't go the way of some of the tiger species that have already become extinct. It isn't just hunting, but habitat destruction. Most creatures can handle changes in weather and climate, it seems to me. Handling humans is a much more difficult proposition, even when they aren't hunting, but "only" destroying the forests and other habitats that creatures need to live.