New Study Poses Climate Change as Real Cause of African Megafauna Extinction

New Research Shows It Likely Was Not Due to Humans’ Habit of Overhunting

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.