this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Today I Learned (TIL)
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The usual reason, probably.
So death?
People. The secret ingredient is people. Pretty much any large species of mammal (or bird) that went extinct in the past 10.000 years or so was hunted to extinction.
Environmental changes. Got it.
I mean I guess everything is an environmental change. Meteor does are just a very rapid environmental change. Bullets: highly localized change in environment.
My point is that humans hunting is barely a blipp on the radar on a larger scale. Like that time 70-80% of all species on this planet went extinct and people still argue about why.
People have this weird view of nature having equilibrium or balance. It never has and never will. Nature is constantly changing whether we are here or not. We mostly notice when our prey animals die out.
Definitely people think nature is an equilibrium when it's actually very dynamic.
But also humans change their environments a lot. Even North America's first nations.