Thursday, October 22, 2015

DALLAS, TEXAS—New dates suggest that human hunters may have been directly responsible for the extinction of Australia’s huge monitor lizards, large terrestrial birds, giant wombats, marsupial lions, and giant kangaroos. “There’s been a lengthy, sometimes heated debate about whether human hunting or other impacts caused the huge mass extinction of large terrestrial vertebrates in Australia during the last glacial period,” John Alroy of Macquarie University in New South Wales said at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Alroy and his colleagues dated more than 200 fossils and found that the megafauna disappeared between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago. He also estimated that the first humans arrived in Australia between 50,000 and 61,000 years ago. This allows for 14,000 years for humans to spread across Australia and develop technology for hunting large prey. “The results are also important because they’re consistent with evidence that human hunting caused major extinctions later on in North and South America, in addition to relatively recent extinctions on many islands (such as the loss of moas in New Zealand),” Alroy said in a press release. To see examples of ancient Australian art, go to "The Rock Art of Malarrak."