No North American Megafauna Extinction

For our purposes, assume they manage to domesticate horses and camels.

then the natives just took a big step forward. They still need quite a bit of time to get corn up and running, but once they do, they have the makings of a real agricultural package going. If potatoes make it out of the Andes, then they really have it made. To be sure, they will be a long ways behind the Old World (if only because of less time humans have spent in the New World), but they will be further along than they were in OTL...
 

katchen

Banned
We already have a TL in which big headed llamas were domesticated.
Maybe a bit different climate in an earlier glacial or interglacial period that enables Denisovian Man to reach the Americas about 100,000 -150,000 years BP would help.
Then againnow that I think of it. , I wonder how much of the megafauna extinction in North America may have been started off by the series of Yellowstone Park eruptions that blanketed much of North America in volcanic ash before early man even got to North America. Ash fall from these eruptions has been found as far southeast as Georgia. And there were other eruptions like that of Mt. Mazama, which created Crater Lake even later. One might have to butterfly some geological events to keep megafauna off the road to extinction in North America.
 
Fair point. I'm still inclined to place the lion's share of the 'blame' (pun incidental) on climate change. DNA studies (there was a nifty one in Proceedings B on woolly mammoths late last year http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1770/20131910.full) suggest that interglacials prompted significant bottlenecking. Humans could likely do in populations already weakened/shrunk by climate change, but I doubt that they were numerous enough/widespread enough for a complete extermination scenario.

Well, I think that's reasonable: human arrival leading to the extermination of populations of animals that were already under some stress.

That said, the megafauna of Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand all encountered humans at periods that were not ones of major climate change, and the result seems to have been reasonably rapid extermination, although things aren't entirely clear in the Australian case. The main anomaly seems to be Europe, where the megafauna undoubtedly lived alongside humans for some time. That said, there were pre-existing populations of various Homo species in Europe for a million years before the arrival of H.Sapiens.

Then againnow that I think of it. , I wonder how much of the megafauna extinction in North America may have been started off by the series of Yellowstone Park eruptions that blanketed much of North America in volcanic ash before early man even got to North America. Ash fall from these eruptions has been found as far southeast as Georgia. And there were other eruptions like that of Mt. Mazama, which created Crater Lake even later. One might have to butterfly some geological events to keep megafauna off the road to extinction in North America.

Not a great deal. Yellowstone erupted last about 600,000 years ago, and the megafauna were thriving until about 11,000 years ago.
 
The change in vegetation due to firestick farming/hunting was believed to be a major reason why Australian megafauna died out.

The problem with megafauna extinction causes is that there is argument on when exactly the Americas were peopled. There are DNA studies that suggest that there were people in America before the last glacial maximum started about 23,000 years ago. If that's the case then people coexisted alongside megafauna for over 10,000 years.
 
The exact cause of the mass extinction isn't well understood. It is not wise to think all the extinctIons had the same cause. What happened in Australia and Eurasia was probably different from what was going on in North America. Also the two most prominent models of extinction, climate change and Human hunting, have rather large holes in them.
 

katchen

Banned
11,000 years ago is about the time of the Younger Dryasn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas---a sharp little Ice Age lasting a thousand years apparently caused by the melting of ice dams along what is now the St. Lawrence River . Or a Tunguska like comet impact thought to have occurred in what is IOTL Pennsylvania. In other words, human hunting may have impacted fauna already reeling from climate caused starvation by humans who were also starving because of climate change.. Delay human entry into North America until maybe 500-1000 years after the Younger Dryas finishes and many if not most of these species will probably bounce back and be saved.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
11,000 years ago is about the time of the Younger Dryasn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas---a sharp little Ice Age lasting a thousand years apparently caused by the melting of ice dams along what is now the St. Lawrence River . Or a Tunguska like comet impact thought to have occurred in what is IOTL Pennsylvania. In other words, human hunting may have impacted fauna already reeling from climate caused starvation by humans who were also starving because of climate change.. Delay human entry into North America until maybe 500-1000 years after the Younger Dryas finishes and many if not most of these species will probably bounce back and be saved.

That's actually a really interesting hypothesis.
 
Indeed. Remember only a tiny handful of OTL species have ever been domesticated. Zebras are more closely related to domestic horses than the American horses were, and zebras are entirely wild and undomesticable (if that's a word!). You can't just assume that these animals would be useable for human purposes.


genetic research showed that horse diversity in americas wasnt that high, some species turned to be Equus ferus, and we domesticated this one.. other species were part of Equus lineage as well, even the south american species..
 
One extremely important consequence that no one has brought up yet is the effect on plant communities. When the megafauna went extinct, the plants they had evolved in tandem with were suddenly left without predators and/or seed dispersers. Several species such as avocados, papaya, Osage orange, cherimoya, prickly pears etc managed to cling on long enough to be discovered and propagated by humans. Who knows how many potentially useful species went extinct when the animal that ate their fruits and spread their seeds went extinct.

Large animals like mammoths served the role of savannah elephants and uprooted trees, keeping parts of the Midwest and Southwest much less forested than they were once Europeans arrived. The domination of Southwestern deserts by mesquite is entirely a consequence of the megafaunal extinction. The reintroduction of horses (possibly one of the former dispersal agents) caused mesquite populations to grow even faster.
 
Also, do not forget the woolly rhinoceros. I believe there were several different breeds of them in North America. And just because modern rhinos can't be tamed or domesticated does not mean extinct species could not. The closest relative of modern bush elephants (which cannot be tamed at all) is the now extinct North African elephant that Carthage and Egypt used in thier wars.
 
Large animals like mammoths served the role of savannah elephants and uprooted trees, keeping parts of the Midwest and Southwest much less forested than they were once Europeans arrived.

Oh yes. It's something of a domino effect, and actually can conceivably allow for a small POD that allows several megafauna from the same habitat to survive: if one keystone species does not go extinct at the end of the Ice Age, then several animals around it will not go extinct either. For example, the survival of mammoths could also have meant the survival of horses on arctic and near-arctic steppes.
 
The kicker is environmental change. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Last_glacial_vegetation_map.png
Hunting by humans certainly didn't help any. But with the retreat of the glaciers, cold-adapted megafauna lost their habitat, and megafauna-eating predators lost their food supply, and extinction and so on.

What's needed is some way to 'settle' the megafauna someplace more hospitable- northern Canada, maybe? But it's covered with glaciers when it's cold, and when it's not, it's barren at least for a while, and temperatures inhospitably warm where these critters live. Basically, the most 'robust' way to save the Pleistocene megafauna would require, at least, pretty hefty aberrant behavior of Earth processes.

If you still want to write the TL (and you so totally should,) you could just hop over the nitty-gritty of the extinction and get to the meat of things (no pun intended.) You could say that there was a minor (as in, smaller than OTL,) extinction, and have the critters running around be descendants of the Pleistocene megafauna. Pretty much all the interesting groups had representatives that lived in (relatively) temperate climates. As people have pointed out, many megafauna have 'human-useful' analogues/relatives, so at the very least some (horses, camels) might be domesticated/made useful to humans.

Go for it! The idea's too good to get held up before leaving the house.

I really don't know if it'd be climate change that killed em off. They'd survived many previous ice ages and interglacials without problem and as soon as humans arrive, they're gone. Australia's the only one I can think of with ambiguity where humans had a role. A better scenario may be if you kill off the ancestors of native Americans as soon as they set foot off Beringia, allowing American megafauna to survive, till te Europeans get there. How they may react to Pleistocene megafauna would depend. North American fauna were mainly larger versions of creatures they'd seen, while the South American creatures would be plain strange.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
I really don't know if it'd be climate change that killed em off. They'd survived many previous ice ages and interglacials without problem and as soon as humans arrive, they're gone. Australia's the only one I can think of with ambiguity where humans had a role. A better scenario may be if you kill off the ancestors of native Americans as soon as they set foot off Beringia, allowing American megafauna to survive, till te Europeans get there. How they may react to Pleistocene megafauna would depend. North American fauna were mainly larger versions of creatures they'd seen, while the South American creatures would be plain strange.
But then you have Eurasia, where humans aren't new. The Megafauna is Eurasia surivived human presence fine, up until about the same time it went extinct in North America, when it jus suddenly disappeared. If the Eurasian megafauna can survive human presence, so can the North American. The reason the megafauna died both in North America and Eurasia is most likley many bad things happening at once. Climate change happened at the same time as there were humans present. And while one bad thing wouldn't be so hard to cope with, two of them just might have been too much.
 
Also, do not forget the woolly rhinoceros. I believe there were several different breeds of them in North America. And just because modern rhinos can't be tamed or domesticated does not mean extinct species could not. The closest relative of modern bush elephants (which cannot be tamed at all) is the now extinct North African elephant that Carthage and Egypt used in thier wars.

wooly rhinos werent present in north america + they are very very unlikely to be tamed, and even domesticated..
 
Also, do not forget the woolly rhinoceros. I believe there were several different breeds of them in North America. And just because modern rhinos can't be tamed or domesticated does not mean extinct species could not. The closest relative of modern bush elephants (which cannot be tamed at all) is the now extinct North African elephant that Carthage and Egypt used in thier wars.
Might want to check on that one. I think rhinos went extinct in North America a few million years earlier. Europe, yes. North America, I don't believe so.
 
I wrote a scenario similar to this called "Llamas In Appalachia" years ago for my AH newsletters, and modified it a bit for my American Indian Victories collection. The idea there was that a local (to the Appalachians) tick-borne llama disease could jump to humans and caused a fatal disease. Result: the first wave of humans to North America didn't initially expand into Appalachia, leaving a substantial pocket of the original megafauna.

As the continent filled up, humans eventually pushed into that pocket, though slowly because of the disease, and exterminated most of the megafauna, but North American llamas had enough extra time to adapt to hunting pressure and survived long enough to be domesticated.

Why llamas? I figured that animals where their analogues in South America survived would be the most likely to survive in North America. That meant Llamas and peccaries, and llamas would have been the more useful of the two.

The "disease that could jump to humans" idea could be used in a variety of ways. If a disease like malaria (or even malaria itself) was already endemic in the warmer parts of the New World, and jumped to humans when they reached the infected areas, that could slow down human settlement of the continents long enough for more megafauna to survive in the southern US and South/Central America, then expand back out once they adapted to human predators.

By the way, for what it is worth, this article claims that horses and mammoths survived in small numbers in a refuge area in the interior of Alaska for several thousand years after humans settled the area.

If anything was going to survive among the megafauna, horses and mammoths would have been logical candidates. Both survived prolonged human contact in the Old World. Horses were fast. Mammoths would have been smart and adaptable, based on being related to elephants. Slow reproduction would be their major downside.
 
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