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Moderator Posts: 21945 |
"One of these was a giant, leaf-munching kangaroo called Procoptodon goliah that weighed hundreds of kilograms, possibly walked like a dinosaur, and went extinct about 15,000 years ago." The aborigines got here 40,000 years ago, did they hunt this animal to extinction ? | |
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Member Posts: 4499 |
No one knows for sure. In fact, I think the latest estimate of Aboriginal colonisation of Australia is now about 60,000 years. Early Aboriginal colonists would have certainly overlapped with some megafauna species, which most zoologists agree would have been relatively slow moving because of their size (heavy body and slow metabolic rate), so they would have been easy to hunt and they would have provided a lot of meat. But as the article says, climate change would have also had an effect. In Australia, there have been at least four major advances of glacier ice during the last 70,000 years. The coldest part of the last ice age was 20,000-22,000 years ago and only lasted a few thousand years. The advancing glacial climate dried out the continent and turned rainforests into grasslands and open woodlands. Since a lot of the megafauna ate leaves, rather than grass, they gradually found that they had insufficient food, which probably also contributed to their demise. | |
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