Climate Change May Be True Cause for Extinction of Africa’s Megafauna
Africa has long been held as the place of human origins in prehistory. For some time now, many appropriate members of the scientific community have believed the hunting on the part of Homo erectus (and the other ancestors of modern Homo sapiens) was a major contributor to the eventual extinction of much of the continent’s megafauna.
Certainly, we still see a number of sizeable mammal species in Africa today. However, recently published research suggests climate change as an even more threatening element of the African extinction equation. Tens of millions of years ago, the carbon dioxide levels were several times higher than what they are in modern times. It seems the decrease of carbon dioxide over roughly the past five to seven million years may have had catastrophic effects. This climate change was a global transformation at least initially in atmosphere and some temperature.
Climate is unmistakably an important aspect of an environment. Thus, scientists are thinking the global CO2 difference in the atmosphere mix is an event likely linked to the largescale development of grassland habitat observed around this same period in Africa. This change is flora would have affected any herbivorous fauna there at the time.
It would have put certain animals’ diets off-kilter. One species’ grazing methods may have become obsolete, possibly starving the creatures to death if they could not properly accumulate enough food. The result, as observed by the scientists examining the locale and period, was the extinction of a number of herbivorous megafauna.
Tyler Faith heads the study group investigating this notion and favoring it instead of the ideal that human hunters were the perpetrators responsible for the death of Africa’s heavyweight mammals of large proportions. Professor Faith serves as the curator of archaeology at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Assisting him were three additional researchers.
“…there are also major extinctions among African carnivores at this time and that some of them, like saber-tooth cats, may have specialized on very large prey,” assistant Paul Koch pointed out. “It could be that some of these carnivores disappeared with their megaherbivore prey.” This explains the disappearance of some of the large carnivorous mammals of the period as well.
Professor Tyler Faith concludes their research with the assertion that climatic and environmental adaptations were collectively playing “the key role in Africa’s past extinctions,” not an overhunting of fauna by humanity’s ancestors.
