A groundbreaking study by researchers from Tel Aviv University tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years—as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size—improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.

The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct,

Well, we've waxed. So we can wane. Let's just hope we wane gently. Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults. One study says we hit as low as 40.

Forty? Come on, that can't be right. Well, the technical term is 40 "breeding pairs" (children not included). More likely there was a drastic dip and then 5,000 to 10,000 bedraggled Homo sapiens struggled together in pitiful little clumps hunting and gathering for thousands of years until, in the late Stone Age, we humans began to recover. But for a time there, says science writer Sam Kean, "We damn near went extinct."

I'd never heard of this almost-blinking-out. That's because I'd never heard of Toba, the "supervolcano." It's not a myth. While details may vary, Toba happened.

Macdoc wrote:sure for a limited area.

Macdoc wrote:Earth is big - and our populations have never been robust until near history.

Macdoc wrote:
Now what's more likely - humans or climate?

Macdoc wrote:Australia is the perfect lab - we know when humans arrived and we know the extinnction rate of mega=fauna prior to that and after

Macdoc wrote:
There is also evidence uncovered in Greenland of a size large crater under the edge of the ice that may have caused the LIA.
I don't discount regional impacts of human predation but 10,000s of thousands of indigenous North Americans did not wipe out the big fauna in 20,000 years. Bisons roamed in millions, caribou and moose in tens of thousands, lots of grizzlies and polar bear and even mammoths were around.

GEOL 204 Dinosaurs, Early Humans, Ancestors & Evolution:
The Fossil Record of Vanished Worlds of the Prehistoric Past

Roll Call of Doom
Africa: Essentially modern composition of the animal life in the Pleistocene (indeed, nearly modern in the Pliocene). So very little evidence for a Quaternary Period extinction among carnivores and herbivores from the continent of humanity's birth.

Indian Subcontinent: In work first published in 2020, the pattern for this region is somewhat similar to Africa. Many of the species present in the Pleistocene are still with us today. The extinction includes two proboscideans: the giant straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon namadicus (possibly the largest land mammal of all time) and smaller Stegodon namadicus, an extinct species of the pygmy hippopotamus genus Hexaprotodon, and the local horse Equus namadicus (as well as regional extinction of the ostrich Struthio camelus and the pseudoextinction of the Indian aurochs Bos namadicus, ancestor of Indian zebu cattle).

East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia: Less well studied than many other regions, there were local mammoths and other proboscideans (such as species of Stegodon), rhinos, and deer which died out, as well as the giant orangutan relative Gigantopithecus and the tiny hobbit Homo floresiensis. (Indeed, on Flores Island there were giant storks, giant rats, giant lizards, and dwarf Stegodon: an odd community). Also, the "mystery" Denisovans and Maludong peoples disappear as well.

...at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort

...a continual decline in the size of game hunted by humans as their main food source—from giant elephants 1-1.5 million years ago down to gazelles 10,000 years ago.

Abstract

Multiple large-bodied species went extinct during the Pleistocene. Changing climates and/or human hunting are the main hypotheses used to explain these extinctions. We studied the causes of Pleistocene extinctions in the Southern Levant, and their subsequent effect on local hominin food spectra, by examining faunal remains in archaeological sites across the last 1.5 million years. We examined whether climate and climate changes, and/or human cultures, are associated with these declines. We recorded animal abundances published in the literature from 133 stratigraphic layers, across 58 Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological sites, in the Southern Levant. We used linear regressions and mixed models to assess the weighted mean mass of faunal assemblages through time and whether it was associated with temperature, paleorainfall, or paleoenvironment (C3 vs. C4 vegetation). We found that weighted mean body mass declined log-linearly through time. Mean hunted animal masses 10,500 years ago, were only 1.7% of those 1.5 million years ago. Neither body size at any period, nor size change from one layer to the next, were related to global temperature or to temperature changes. Throughout the Pleistocene, new human lineages hunted significantly smaller prey than the preceding ones. This suggests that humans extirpated megafauna throughout the Pleistocene, and when the largest species were depleted the next-largest were targeted. Technological advancements likely enabled subsequent human lineages to effectively hunt smaller prey replacing larger species that were hunted to extinction or until they became exceedingly rare.

Spearthrower wrote:Just as a FYI - here's the paper in question:

The_Metatron wrote:Seems to me humanity has rarely, if ever, failed to consume all available resources. Why should the treatment of megafauna be any different?

Hermit wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:Seems to me humanity has rarely, if ever, failed to consume all available resources. Why should the treatment of megafauna be any different?

There may have been an insufficient number of hominid stomachs around to achieve such a mammoth task a million years ago.

Spearthrower wrote:

Hermit wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:Seems to me humanity has rarely, if ever, failed to consume all available resources. Why should the treatment of megafauna be any different?

There may have been an insufficient number of hominid stomachs around to achieve such a mammoth task a million years ago.

But that relies on an assumption that humans were killing them for food. They may also have killed for materials, for prestige, for rites... and perhaps most significantly, unintentionally/indirectly through changing the landscape the animals were strongly adapted for.

The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction...

Hermit wrote:Even if hominids hunted and killed large fauna for reasons other than as a food source I doubt there were enough of them to have "caused the mass extinction of large animals over the past hundreds of thousands of years".

Spearthrower wrote:

Hermit wrote:Even if hominids hunted and killed large fauna for reasons other than as a food source I doubt there were enough of them to have "caused the mass extinction of large animals over the past hundreds of thousands of years".

Ok, but on what grounds is your doubt based? Wouldn't you also need to know the number of individuals of those megafauna species to be able to surmise so?

Hermit wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

Hermit wrote:Even if hominids hunted and killed large fauna for reasons other than as a food source I doubt there were enough of them to have "caused the mass extinction of large animals over the past hundreds of thousands of years".

Ok, but on what grounds is your doubt based? Wouldn't you also need to know the number of individuals of those megafauna species to be able to surmise so?

Well, the above graph estimates the global human population to be around 4 million 2200 years ago. I have no idea what the number of homo x might have been 10,000 or 100,000 years earlier, but my wild guess is it would have been substantially lower. I just doubt that the number would have been high enough to be capable of killing enough mammoths and other megafauna to cause the mass extinction even given hundreds of thousands of years to do it in.