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    Madame Moseille
    The giant marsupials of Australia like diprotodons would have been easy prey for early humans because they had never encountered humans before and did not see them as a threat. In contrast, animals in Africa and Asia had evolved over millions of years to avoid humans as dangerous predators. When humans first arrived in Australia around 45,000 years ago, they had already mastered fire and used it to deliberately burn large areas of forest to create open grasslands better suited to hunting and their needs, drastically changing the Australian ecology and contributing to the extinction of many large animal species unprepared to adapt.

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    Guilty 3

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    The giant marsupials of Australia like diprotodons would have been easy prey for early humans because they had never encountered humans before and did not see them as a threat. In contrast, animals in Africa and Asia had evolved over millions of years to avoid humans as dangerous predators. When humans first arrived in Australia around 45,000 years ago, they had already mastered fire and used it to deliberately burn large areas of forest to create open grasslands better suited to hunting and their needs, drastically changing the Australian ecology and contributing to the extinction of many large animal species unprepared to adapt.

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    The giant marsupials of Australia like diprotodons would have been easy prey for early humans because they had never encountered humans before and did not see them as a threat. In contrast, animals in Africa and Asia had evolved over millions of years to avoid humans as dangerous predators. When humans first arrived in Australia around 45,000 years ago, they had already mastered fire and used it to deliberately burn large areas of forest to create open grasslands better suited to hunting and their needs, drastically changing the Australian ecology and contributing to the extinction of many large animal species unprepared to adapt.

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    26 views2 pages

    Guilty 3

    Uploaded by

    Madame Moseille
    The giant marsupials of Australia like diprotodons would have been easy prey for early humans because they had never encountered humans before and did not see them as a threat. In contrast, animals in Africa and Asia had evolved over millions of years to avoid humans as dangerous predators. When humans first arrived in Australia around 45,000 years ago, they had already mastered fire and used it to deliberately burn large areas of forest to create open grasslands better suited to hunting and their needs, drastically changing the Australian ecology and contributing to the extinction of many large animal species unprepared to adapt.

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    In fact, for all their size, diprotodons and Australia’s other giants

    probably wouldn’t have been that hard to hunt because they would
    have
    been taken totally by surprise by their two-legged assailants. Various
    human species had been prowling and evolving in Afro-Asia for 2
    million years. They slowly honed their hunting skills, and began going
    after large animals around 400,000 years ago. The big beasts of Africa
    and Asia learned to avoid humans, so when the new mega-predator –
    Homo sapiens – appeared on the Afro-Asian scene, the large animals
    already knew to keep their distance from creatures that looked like it. In
    contrast, the Australian giants had no time to learn to run away.
    Humans
    don’t come across as particularly dangerous. They don’t have long,
    sharp
    teeth or muscular, lithe bodies. So when a diprotodon, the largest
    marsupial ever to walk the earth, set eyes for the first time on this
    fraillooking
    ape, he gave it one glance and then went back to chewing
    leaves. These animals had to evolve a fear of humankind, but before
    they
    could do so they were gone.
    The second explanation is that by the time Sapiens reached Australia,
    they had already mastered fire agriculture. Faced with an alien and
    threatening environment, they deliberately burned vast areas of
    impassable thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands, which
    attracted more easily hunted game, and were better suited to their
    needs. They thereby completely changed the ecology of large parts of
    Australia within a few short millennia. One body of evidence supporting
    this view is the fossil plant record.
    Eucalyptus trees were rare in Australia 45,000 years ago. But the arrival
    of Homo sapiens inaugurated a golden age for the species. Since
    eucalyptuses are particularly resistant to fire, they spread far and wide
    while other trees and shrubs disappeared.
    These changes in vegetation influenced the animals that ate the plants
    and the carnivores that ate the vegetarians. Koalas, which subsist
    exclusively on eucalyptus leaves, happily munched their way into new
    territories. Most other animals suffered greatly. Many Australian food
    chains collapsed, driving the weakest links into extinction.5

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