Saturday Satire

Make you Fink on Friday

‘Humans killed off Australia’s giant beasts’

Scientists have linked a dramatic decrease in spores found in herbivore dung to the arrival of humans in Australia 41,000 years ago

 

Humans hunted Australia’s giant vertebrates to extinction about 40,000 years ago, the latest research published in Science has concluded.

The cause of the widespread extinction has provoked much debate, with climate change being one theory.

However, scientists studied dung samples from 130,000 and 41,000 years ago, when humans arrived, and concluded hunting and fire were the cause.

The extinction in turn caused major ecological changes to the landscape.

The scientists looked at pollen and charcoal from Lynch’s Crater, a sediment-filled volcanic crater in Queensland that was surrounded by tropical rainforest until European settlement.

They found Sporormiella spores, which grow in herbivore dung, virtually disappeared around 41,000 years ago, a time when no known climate transformation was taking place.

At the same time, the incidence of fire increased, as shown by a steep rise in charcoal fragments.

It appears that humans, who arrived in Australia around this time, hunted the megafauna to extinction, the scientists said.

The megafauna included three-metre tall giant kangaroos and marsupial lions, as well as giant birds and reptiles.

Source: BBC News Read more

Opinion:

Man never learns. We are doing it again; or have we ever stopped?

Of all the pestilences on this planet, man is the worst. No other species kills, maims or deforms itself. Man has killed more humans than any natural disaster or disease in nature.

Animals don’t do this.

Man is a lower life form than the animals.

Man may have technology, man may have intelligence and rational thought (LOL there’s a laugh for you) but man remains the stupidest life form on Earth.