SOWK 2035 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Smilodon, Giant Tortoise, Gray Wolf
15 Apr 2020
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Document Summary
North america suffered many extinctions, roughly 11000 bp at the end of the last glacial period. Peccaries (new world pig), europeans brought them. Dire wolves: largest wolf, killed to survive, hunts in packs. Saiga: type of antelope , still found today. 14 species of pronghorn, 13 are extinct. Giant beaver (castoroides), largest rodent, size of a modern black bear. Giant condors, part of tetrahorn family (birds of prey) Descended from asian ancestors (except bison) with human predator. Five theories for quaternary extinctions (at the end of pleistocene) Human overhunting (blamed on clovis people), blitzkrieg: deliberately hunting to extinct. Animals didn"t know they should be careful of humans, made animals easy targets. Against: humans needed their prey so they couldn"t hunt to extinction, also have different dietary. Small amount of animals still survived, example, human hunted bison throughout history but they are still alive. The dwarfing of animals do not explain the overhunting.
