Subject:  Viridian Note 00057:  Extinct Megafauna

Key concepts:  involuntary parks, war zone theory,
game preserves, prehistoric extinction catastrophes, 
landscape alteration, American megafauna 

Attention Conservation Notice:  Could provoke severe 
cognitive dissonance in devotees of "Nature."

From: steffen@ems.org^^^^^^^^^^^^^^***** (Alex Steffen)

Source: William K. Stevens, New York Times


"The West of Lewis and Clark may not have been so pristine
'Buffer zones' between tribes seen as early game 
preserves"

by William K. Stevens; The New York Times

(...)

    "Fond tradition pictures the plains and mountains of 
the Lewis and Clark era as a nature untouched by humans 
and apart from them: a sort of original realm of the wild, 
undisturbed and eternal. Many experts, however, have long 
since abandoned that vision.

    "Today they see humans as longtime major players in 
nature's grand drama, and Native Americans among the main 
ecological actors of the old West (...).

    "Now, citing as evidence the marvelously detailed 
journals of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, 
some scientists are proposing that even Indian warfare 
played a critical ecological role, by regulating and 
maintaining both the numbers and distribution of bison and 
other big animals of the West before descendants of 
Europeans settled it.

   "Basically, according to this 'war zone' theory, Indian 
hunters were so proficient that in an individual tribe's 
homeland, populations of big game such as bison and elk 
seriously declined and in some cases disappeared. But in 
several big buffer zones between warring tribes, where 
hunters were loath to spend much time lest their enemies 
attack them, big game found more safety and flourished.

    "These no-man's-lands functioned, in effect, as game 
preserves and may have kept the plains bison and other big 
animals from being hunted to extinction well before 
Europeans arrived.

     "Not everyone agrees wholly with the theory. But the 
spotlight it casts on humans' impact on the pre-Columbian 
landscape also highlights one of the major conceptual 
problems facing present-day efforts to restore and 
conserve 'natural' ecosystems: What target should be aimed 
at? Should the goal be to maintain nature as nearly as 
possible in the state it was in before the ancestors of 
the Indians came to America many millenniums ago? Or to 
its state just before Europeans appeared on the continent? 
Or to some other state altogether?

     "The war-zone theory is laid out in the February 
issue of the journal Conservation Biology by Paul Martin, 
a paleoecologist at the University of Arizona, and 
Christine Szuter, editor-in-chief of the University of 
Arizona Press. Martin says the theory could partly explain 
why bison, elk, deer and bears escaped the fate of other, 
even bigger North American animal species that became 
extinct 13,000 years ago.

    "These included, among others, mammoths, mastodons, 
camels, giant sloths, tapirs and predators that depended 
on them, like giant short-faced bears, a giant wolf called 
the dire wolf and the saber-toothed cat.

    "The bison is the largest surviving life form in North 
America, and Martin is the chief advocate of the view that 
the earlier vanished species of megafauna, as they are 
called, were hunted to extinction in a continentwide 
'blitzkrieg' lasting several centuries by human hunters 
who had migrated to North America from Siberia 15,000 
years ago or more.

    "'The land had been stripped of most of its native 
megafauna through human influence' long before Lewis and 
Clark appeared on the scene, Martin and Szuter write. And 
except for the influence of humans, they say, much larger 
populations of the surviving bison, elk and deer would 
have greeted the white explorers.

(...)

    "For his part, Martin advocates the establishment of 
some nature preserves where the pre-Indian natural world 
might be re-created as closely as possible. African or 
Asian elephants, for instance, might stand in for the 
extinct mammoths, enabling scientists to see something of 
how the pre-human North American landscape functioned 
ecologically."

(((bruces remarks:  This is certain to become a more 
popular theory, as the massive extinctions in our own time 
weigh more and more heavily on our conscience.  If the 
biggest and most photogenic American animals were all 
snuffed by migrating Siberians 15,000 years ago, it rather 
lets us off the hook concerning the imminent demise of the 
blue-tongued mango vole.  As for the timid half-step of 
introducing Asian elephants to the American steppelands, 
why stop there?  It's time for a serious effort to thaw 
out frozen Siberian mammoths, and do some full-scale, 
Dolly-the-Sheep-style, genetic restoration activity.)))

Alex Steffen
Program Director
Environmental Media Services
Western States Office
steffen@ems.org
http://www.ems.org