If these animals hadn't gone extinct, how would they fare today?
- Thread starter saint polype
- Start date
Well, does it have to be 100% proved, or can be a "Pretty much proved"?
Because the latter, pretty much all megafauna would be included:
- In Australia, we would talk of giant marsupials like Diprotodon and Thylacoleo, and giant reptiles like Megalania. New South Wales and Queensland would be the only places I could see them persist
- South America, Ground Sloths, Giant armadillos and wonders like Macrauchenia or Toxodon, with familiar faces like camels, sabretooths and mastodons
- North America, a faunal diversity that dwarfs Africa: Mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, armadillos, bison, camels, horses, and predators like American lion, Sabertooth and the Short Faced Bear
- Europe, the big loser, would be now populated by template megafauna, that during the Ice Age refuged in the Iberian Peninsula: Short-tusked elephants, rhinos, hippos, auroch, horses etc
Because the latter, pretty much all megafauna would be included:
- In Australia, we would talk of giant marsupials like Diprotodon and Thylacoleo, and giant reptiles like Megalania. New South Wales and Queensland would be the only places I could see them persist
- South America, Ground Sloths, Giant armadillos and wonders like Macrauchenia or Toxodon, with familiar faces like camels, sabretooths and mastodons
- North America, a faunal diversity that dwarfs Africa: Mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, armadillos, bison, camels, horses, and predators like American lion, Sabertooth and the Short Faced Bear
- Europe, the big loser, would be now populated by template megafauna, that during the Ice Age refuged in the Iberian Peninsula: Short-tusked elephants, rhinos, hippos, auroch, horses etc
See, this is what makes me wanna scream in the whole story - how a lot of the hunting during th final days was motivated by "let's kill and stuff as many of them as we can before they're all extinct!
".???!!!??
I hate that we had to go through a phase of screeching short-sighted idiocy like that before the idea of protecting nature ever gained steam.
There are some accounts that some species of ground sloths survived in the Caribbean, long enough to the arrival of the first humans.
forgot about that one, and another critter called the blue buck, IIRC... both basically wiped out by zealous overhunting in colonial S. Africa.
IIRC, the ground sloth survived in both N and S America after humans arrived. It used to be a cryptozoological thing that it was still surviving in the wilds of Patagonia, but they've never found one...
I once heard there were still ground sloths around when Columbus arrived, but I couldn't find any verification for that.
I think all the ground sloths died out before that... climate change and hunting pressure did them all in. The ones in the Caribbean lasted longer, but not that long. The cryptozoological part of it comes from a handful of accounts of early Spanish explorers in Patagonia who said they saw something like it, and some seemingly very fresh remains found in a cave in 1895. But Patagonia is scarcely unexplored today, and nobody found one, so wishful thinking...
Human hunting and climate change, both together the responsible, and one couldn't do it without the another
- Climate change could never have provoked such a extinction
- But at the same time, where humans arrived and there wasn't climate change, megafauna could support hunting
So, in order to realistically have megafauna surviving, we need to eliminate or delay one of them
- Climate change could never have provoked such a extinction
- But at the same time, where humans arrived and there wasn't climate change, megafauna could support hunting
So, in order to realistically have megafauna surviving, we need to eliminate or delay one of them
Unless you develop a conservation movement earlier in history, there really isn't much that went extinct before 1885 that can be saved.
Zachariah
Banned
How about species which could potentially have been saved through some degree of domestication?
A surviving mammoth population would probably mean a surviving mammoth steppe. Which means a great deal for the survival of permafrost and global warming mitigation, as well as increasing the carrying capacity of the Arctic in general.
Then we're dealing with such a radically differently world that it's impossible to say what it looks like. Even something like the North American horse being domesticated is such a massive game changer that it's difficult to say what happens when Europeans show up and what colonial societies develop.
Carrier pigeons have nothing to do with passenger pigeons, which is probably what you're thinking of.
The Russian Steppe Bison of the ice age, wonder if it could have been domesticated.
BlondieBC
Banned
You need a disease vector keeping the human population down. If you imagine the European Tsetse Fly combined with European sleeping sickness, then it would be easy to imagine some of the major species surviving. So once the humans hit the open planes of Hungary or the Ukraine, they generally can't sustain dense populations.