No megafauna extinction in the Americas

Both Lions and Tigers ranged throughout the cradle of civilisation between Egypt and India as well as China. Jaguars lived in the cradle of American civilisation in Mexico and South America.

In fact it looks like megafauna preadators like Sabre Tooths, American and European lions died out in places which didnt become densely populated until much later, and the ones that lived near the most people did fine.
 
Both Lions and Tigers ranged throughout the cradle of civilisation between Egypt and India as well as China. Jaguars lived in the cradle of American civilisation in Mexico and South America.
The operative there being the past tense.

In fact it looks like megafauna preadators like Sabre Tooths, American and European lions died out in places which didnt become densely populated until much later, and the ones that lived near the most people did fine.
Hunter-gatherers went much further afield for their meat when compared to farmers, so they encountered big predators more often. As for coexistence, maybe a few smart lions and tigers got wise to the humans and learned to stay away, but you could hardly call it doing fine.
 
The really major contractions in big cat (I use them as my example because I like them the best) distribution occured from about 1850, with the multiple impact of population explosion, firepower revoltion and industrial transport methods such as railways opening up the interiors of Africa and India. A good example is that until about a century ago Jaguar ranged from Argentina up to the Grand Canyon USA, witnessing the rise and fall of the Olmecs, Toltecs, Maya, Missispian culture, Mexica, Aztecs and even the Conquistadors. What finally got them was 20th century America, and even so the last one only died 3 years ago.

This is hardly an example of an apex predator laying down in the face of humanity, its more like an indication on how feeble humanity was up until very recently.
 

NothingNow

Banned
The operative there being the past tense.

We're talking up until somewhere in the Late BC, not in the Neolithic era. Big cats generally managed to hang on in places until, as Riain said, quite recently. Admitedly, anything that specializes in larger Megafauna will have more trouble, but nothing too far outside normal expectations.
 
This is hardly an example of an apex predator laying down in the face of humanity, its more like an indication on how feeble humanity was up until very recently.
Actually, it is an example of an apex predator lying down in the face of humanity (if it wasn't those animals would still be inhabiting the areas now), it's just that humanity didn't go after their land until that point.

We're talking up until somewhere in the Late BC, not in the Neolithic era. Big cats generally managed to hang on in places until, as Riain said, quite recently. Admitedly, anything that specializes in larger Megafauna will have more trouble, but nothing too far outside normal expectations.
Lots of American megafauna went extinct in the neolithic era, all at about the same time, which would indicate to me at least that humans, though weak individually, were proving even back then that they weren't to be messed with. The fact that Eurasian and African predators had had a long association with humans is probably what allowed them to survive, they'd learned that you stayed out of the way of humans.
 
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The areas where the Jaguar has been pushed out of in the 20th century were historically populated by Pueblo people who lived in adobe apartments and practiced agiculture. Therefore the jaguar and farming people in relatively high numbers lived in the same area for 1000 years. This is the same for all extant big cats, who have only retreated in a big way in the last 150 years, and beforehand lived alongside and in often competition with settled agricultural and pastoral people for millenia.
 
The areas where the Jaguar has been pushed out of in the 20th century were historically populated by Pueblo people who lived in adobe apartments and practiced agiculture. Therefore the jaguar and farming people in relatively high numbers lived in the same area for 1000 years. This is the same for all extant big cats, who have only retreated in a big way in the last 150 years, and beforehand lived alongside and in often competition with settled agricultural and pastoral people for millenia.
The fact that farming people keep to relatively strict boundaries means that animals can live nearby. It's when the humans are nomadic hunter-gatherers (or are expanding) that animals run into trouble, because the humans will turn up unexpectedly.
 
I think this depends on which theory explaining the extinction you subscribe to. How do you keep the megafauna alive?
If the only way to do this is to keep the humans out of North America, for example, then there are no humans to domesticate these megafauna in the first place.

One theory was that of a meteor or a comet that struck northern North America circa 12,000BC, which caused widespread devastation and led to the local extinction of virtually all megafauna and pretty much wiped out the Clovis culture. By the time that the destruction had passed, about two thousand years later, any mega fauna that survived the initial event were gone, or in such limited numbers that neolithic hunters or proto-AmerInds (or whatever) exterminated them.
Have the meteor miss (or hit elsewhere like EurAsia) and things change dramatically. For one thing the megafauna would have sufficiant numbers to withstand paleoIndian hunting as well as the herdes of bison did.


Regards,
John Braungart ;)
 
It's the best one I could come up with without not having people enter the Americas at all.
I'd have to disagree with your second point. With horses, camels, and other beasts of burden analogous to those in Eurasia and Africa, I think it would be extremely likely that the native civilizations would advance, and possibly reach metal-working technology. At the very least, there would be more Aztec and Inca leveled civilizations peppered across the continent.

I'd have to agree with you on this; if the protoIndians had horses or camels, they would have also had endemic diseases that either might have given them some immunity against General Smallpox when the Europeans arrived or given the Europeans something to take home to the wife and kids....

Regards,
John Braungart ;)
 

NothingNow

Banned
I'd have to agree with you on this; if the protoIndians had horses or camels, they would have also had endemic diseases that either might have given them some immunity against General Smallpox when the Europeans arrived or given the Europeans something to take home to the wife and kids....

It more likely then not, it wouldn't have given them any sort of resistance, but they would have the whole concept of quarantine and Immune systems better adapted to Disease instead of Parasitic infections (like Chagas.) But yeah, they'd definitely have some fun diseases to go the other way as well. A more potent Hemorrhagic Fever with a fairly long incubation time might do the trick. Incidentally, It'd also possibly be the Most deadly STD to date.
 
Hi, Tocomocho



I'm an ecologist by trade. The thing I've learned about ecology is that it doesn't really follow rules.

Bergmann's rule is simply the observation that animals in cold climates tend to be larger than closely-related (i.e. same genus) animals in warmer climates. But, only about 65-70% of mammals and birds conform to Bergmann's rule (see here for a reference). Also, it's only really noticeable with large differences in climate: so, e.g., mammoths living in northern Canada today (which is where they'd probably be today, if they still existed) would probably not be noticeably smaller than Ice Age mammoths.

So there's a whole lot of noise in the pattern.

With this in mind, I hesitate to try to apply Bergmann's rule when dealing with alternate evolutionary history, because I'm not sure if it would really work.

Biology as a whole rarely follows rules, but Bergmann's is particularly common in mammals (and mammal carnivores in particular). It's not just true for species within the same genus, but also for subespecies within the same species - both the cougar and the jaguar have their biggest, most robust subespecies in the northernmost and southernmost corners of their range*, and the smallests near the equator. When it isn't the case it's usually easy to see why (desert-adapted populations, insular dwarfism, adaptations to hunting a particular prey that isn't found in other places, etc.).

Wooly mammoths, if they still existed, would be limited to the tundra in the northernmost coast and the islands north of Canada, and they would be more or less the same size indeed (unless insular dwarfism kicked in). But I was talking mostly about animals that would end in temperate or cold-temperate climates rather than outright polar ones. American lions would probably still rival the tiger for the title of biggest felid but wouldn't be that big, dire wolves would have the size of common wolves (they weren't really that different in size, but mostly on cranial architecture and hyena-like, bone-crushing feeding adaptations after all) and so on.

* The jaguar is even clearer when you count the extinct Pleistocene subspecies from Patagonia and the US as far as Wyoming, although this species seems to have been more adapted to open grasslands at that time and having switched to forests only during the Holocene. Other rare instance when this happened was the European bison. So yeah, there is a very small window for some grassland species to adapt to the temperate forests of the East Coast, but that's it.

ETA: Funny note, but with all these mega-ungulates still wandering around, the "California" condor would be one of the most common birds in North America, at least west of the Mississippi.
 
Hi, Tocomocho.

... Bergmann's is particularly common in mammals (and mammal carnivores in particular). It's not just true for species within the same genus, but also for subespecies within the same species...

It's also been argued that populations and races will show the same trend (e.g., "Eskimos" are heftier on average than mid-latitude humans), but I've always been very skeptical of the studies that show these sorts of things.

Even in species/genera that supposedly conform to Bergmann's rule, the difference is really only statistical: for example, Siberian tigers are generally acknowledged to be larger than Bengal tigers, in conformity with Bergmann's rule. However, the largest tiger on record was a Bengal tiger that was shot in India.

Bergmann's rule often works well if you average out a huge sample size, but it's really not that meaningful for comparing individual animals. In my opinion, it isn't important enough to warrant attention in alternate history (but it is obviously important enough to warrant attention on this thread :) : alright, I'll shut up about it now).
 
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