Off-trail: How mighty are human hunters?
The Billings Gazette reported on a study by Professor Blaire Van Valkenburgh about an alternative explanation for the extinction of woolly mammoths.
Image credit: Mauricio Anton/Oregon State University illustrationHuman hunters have long taken the heat for wiping out the woolly mammoths and leading to the extinction of other species such as dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. But a new theory has offered another possibility — that predators wiped out each other in a competition triggered by human hunters.
“When human hunters arrived on the scene, they provided new competition with these carnivores for the same prey,” said Van Valkenburgh, an expert at UCLA on the paleobiology of carnivores, and a co-author on the study.
To read the full article by Brett French click here.
Published: Monday, August 16, 2010
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