Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Maybe they Should Call on The Aboriginies

Two articles on the same day got me laughing out loud. This one says that scientists have determined that bands of aboriginies wiped out Australia's megafauna marsupials around 40,000 years ago. "If it wasn't climate, then it had to be humans," Flinders University paleontologist Gavin Prideaux, told The Associated Press. However this article says that today's Australians are calling on the military to help extinct one toad species that was introduced in 1935 because the civilian population can't control them.

Australia's big animals did go extinct suddenly according to fossil records. The scientists checked climate conditions at ONE cave and determined there was no big drought at the time of the mass extinction, "so it had to be humans". They also dated the remains using solar lumeniscence, which is a terrible dating method for stuff in a cave. From that paucity of fact they jump to the conclusion that a few bands of aboriginies with stone spears extincted all the megafauna of the entire continent in an archeological blink of the eye. Meanwhile, modern Australians can't even control the population of a single species of toad that was introduced less than 100 years ago! Does anybody else see the irony here?

PS- some of those things that the early Australians were supposed to have wiped out were huge carnivores that were just as likely to wipe THEM out.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home