Australian Researchers think they have figured out what made dwarf hippos and elephants disappear from the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea.
They say it was humans. The team from Flinders University said that when humans first arrived on the island about 14,000 years ago that was the beginning of the end for so-called “megafauna” on Cyprus. It is not clear what combination of human activities may have led to the animals’ extinction, but hunting and changes to available food hunting grounds when humans moved in are likely candidates.
Team leader Corey Bradshaw said the research helps disprove romantic but false ideas about “primitive” human civilizations. The myth of the “noble savage” proposes that pre-technological humans live in harmony with nature like some sort of Garden of Eden tableau. Modern people seem to think that low-tech societies can’t have much of an effect on the environment, and Bradshaw says that’s just wrong.
Archaeologists believe the dwarf hippos and the elephants, the only indigenous megafauna on Cyprus, disappeared in about 1,000 years after humans settled the island.
Bradshaw said that until recently many disputed that humans were even on Cyprus 14,000 years ago, and there have never been enough good quality specimens to really prove the case until now. Modern people seem to want to blame extinctions and changes to the environment on “climate change” rather than on direct human action.
Today, Cyprus is an island country with more than 1 million people. It’s about 40 miles south of Turkey and 60 miles to the west of Syria. The island is the third-largest in the Mediterranean, and measures 140 miles in the east-west direction, and only 60 miles from the north to the south.
The dwarf hippos and dwarf elephants lived on the island during a period from about 130,000 years ago to 14,000 years ago. Draw hippos weighed almost 300 pounds, while dwarf elephants weighed more than 1,000 pounds.
How many humans did it theoretically take to drive the island’s populations of hippos and elephants to extinction? The research team thinks the human population numbered only 3,000 to 7,000.
The results suggest that a population of 3,000–7,000 hunter-gatherers in Cyprus could have been responsible for driving both dwarf species to extinction.
“The main determinant of extinction risk for both species was the proportion of edible meat they provided to the first people on the island,” Bradshaw said in a statement. The study’s predictions aligned with the chronological sequence of megafauna extinctions found in paleontological records, adding weight to the findings.
Cyprus was the perfect “lab” for this work to be carried out in. “Because Cyprus is a small, reasonably spatially homogenous environment, has only two megafauna species and not a lot else to eat easily, it is the perfect test case for how small populations can hunt enough animals to extinction in a short time frame,” Bradshaw explained.
The study provides evidence that even small human populations with limited technology can have significant impacts on native ecosystems. Similar questions of human versus environmental impacts on extinction still linger over many ancient species, including the famous woolly mammoth.
Yet despite the success of the team’s method on Cyprus, Bradshaw remains skeptical about its applicability to other mysteries of megafauna extinction.
“It’s difficult to apply the same methods elsewhere because most regions are too spatially variable, they have quite a large diversity of potential pretty complicating things, and extinction and arrival chronologies are poorly resolved,” he said.
“But, the more we examine, the more we conclude that humans were probably the primary drivers in most places, with climate change exacerbating the additional mortality in some cases.”
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