AH Challenge: Mega-Fauna Survive!

Brilliant Idea Trebuchet!!!

I must say the thought had never occured to me that an earlier introduction of Humans to the Americas. Perhaps this could also lead to an earlier domestication of mega-fuana.
 
The already pointed problem of this discussion is that probably there wasn't a single reason why the megafauna disappeared, and the most recent evidence seems to suggest that it didn't disappear at a single time either (if we exclude obvious cases like New Zealand): For example, today we know that the megaceros did survive in pockets of southern Russia and Scotland up to the early Neolithic, that the Sivatherium was known by early Mesopotamians and that the American mastodons survived in regions of Argentina and the Great Lakes till just some millennia ago.

And let's not mention extinctions that simply do not make sense, like those of the musk ox surviving in America but disappearing in Eurasia, or the saiga doing exactly the opposite thing (reintroductions clearly show that both animals can live today in the continents where they disappeared), or the American cheetah simply vanishing and leaving its main prey, the pronghorn, to roam free and multiply by the millions without any predator fast enough to catch it... We will probably never know why those happened.
 
Just a couple of thoughts here.

1. All extinctions make sense, if you understand them... We just don't always understand the reasons why one population might crash and another apparently equal population might survive. This is particularly true if disease is the cause. Imagine what would have happened if the Black Death had killed everyone in Afro-Eurasia... In that time line, the discovers of the Afro-Eurasia would wonder what killed beings that looked more of less the same as they did...

2. Even if we accept that humans or some other single causation was the reason for the extinctions, it doesn't mean that removing them, or some other contributing cause does not allow a species to survive. The creatures could have been under severe environmental stress, and humans were just the straw that broke the proverbial (or in this case, possibly literal) camel's back.

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Bill
 
The megafauna can be saved by having people head over to the Americas *earlier*. The Old World species (mostly) survived because their first exposure to humans wasn't Neolithic hunters who could bltiz through two continents worth of animals not used to regarding little pipsqueak monkeys as a serious threat. How you'd get hominids in the Americas earlier is difficult. I'll rank three in declining order of likeliness: (1) Neanderthals hunting something on a glacier end up taking a cruise when the glacier calves off into an iceberg. It appears from current evidence that Neanderthals hunted in mixed-sex groups, so this puts a breeding population with a food source (dead mastadon or whatever) into the ocean. They drift across and end up stranded in the Americas someplace. (2) Hominids (of any stripe) along the West African coast take an unscheduled trip on a mangrove raft. Less likely to have a whole tribe taken for a ride. OTL, this is how monkeys reached South America. They'd end up somewhere around Surinam. (3) Parallel evolution of bipedal hominids from some neatropical primates. In any case, they spread out and adapt to the local conditions. In all three cases they should end up in pleasant environments, from their POV - the Neanderthals should end up in parts of North America like the Europe they left, the Africans would end up in another tropical rainforest environment, and in the third case this would be home from the start. Anyways, if you have *that* setup, it's probably even more interesting than just having megafauna, as you'd have another species of humanity with varying degrees of relationship to h. sapiens.

I find this idea fascinating. I've long had some, hard-to-formulate notion that at least a small part of Neanderthal stagnation was their spread-out population. Insufficient number of people talking means an insufficient memetic ecology. Ideas do not emerge, or with too long a frequency between them.
Possibly a virgin continent could have given them some time with a denser population?
 
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