Essay by Eric Worrall
Another mystery case of megafauna disappearing shortly after the arrival of humans with sharp sticks.
Demise of Australia’s large kangaroos likely not caused by climate change, study suggests
…
By Andrew Wulfeck
Published January 22, 2025 11:49pm ESTADELAIDE, Australia – A new study has shed light on the extinction of many of Australia’s prehistoric kangaroos, challenging beliefs that their demise was closely linked to climate change.
In university research published in the journal Science, researchers said they used dental analysis to determine feeding habits, which turned out to differ from previous assumptions.
Wildlife biologists had assumed that climate change transformed ecosystems in ways the giant mammals couldn’t adapt to, but dental analysis now suggests these animals were actually able to adjust to the changing environment.
…
“Our study shows that most prehistoric kangaroos at Naracoorte had broad diets. This dietary flexibility likely played a key role in their resilience during past changes in climate,” Dr. Samuel Arman, one of the lead researchers on the project, told staff at Flinders University in Australia.
So, what caused many of the continent’s large kangaroos to go extinct?
Researchers suggested the arrival of humans played a more significant role than previously thought more than 40,000 years ago.
Hunters primarily used the animals for their meat, with their skins turned into leather and other materials.
…
Read more: https://www.foxweather.com/earth-space/australia-kangaroos-climate
The abstract of the study;
Dietary breadth in kangaroos facilitated resilience to Quaternary climatic variations
SAMUEL D. ARMAN, GRANT A. GULLY, AND GAVIN J. PRIDEAUX
SCIENCE
9 Jan 2025
Vol 387, Issue 6730
pp. 167-171Editor’s summary
Much can be said about what a species ate based on the form of their teeth. In Australia, it has been hypothesized that the extinction of many large marsupial species by about 40,000 years ago may have been due to a narrow diet in the face of a changing climate. Arman et al. looked at extant and extinct kangaroo species using a tooth microwear approach and concluded that most species were generalists, not specialist grazers or browsers, and thus were adapted to deal with climate-driven vegetation changes. Thus, their demise was likely not driven by climate change, leaving humans as the probable cause. —Sacha Vignieri
Abstract
Identifying what drove the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions on the continents remains one of the most contested topics in historical science. This is especially so in Australia, which lost 90% of its large species by 40,000 years ago, more than half of them kangaroos. Determining causation has been obstructed by a poor understanding of their ecology. Using dental microwear texture analysis, we show that most members of Australia’s richest Pleistocene kangaroo assemblage had diets that were much more generalized than their craniodental anatomy implies. Mixed feeding across most kangaroos pinpoints dietary breadth as a key behavioral adaptation to climate-driven fluctuations in vegetation structure, dispelling the likelihood that late Pleistocene climatic variation was a primary driver of their disappearance.
Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq4340
The varied diet argument seems pretty conclusive – an animal which could adapt its diet to changed conditions would be resilient to changes in conditions.
Reading the Wikipedia description, Procoptodon was likely slow moving compared to modern kangaroos, more of a lumberer than a hopper. Easy prey for early humans with sharp sticks.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Exposure of large animals to different hunters seems not to have worked out well in Australia, the Americas, or New Zealand.
Nor Madagascar, Reunion or Hawaii, et al.
Happy Australia Day!
Thankyou, Happy Australia day to you too 🙂
Killed off by people of color? Impossible!
This study will not be received well here in Oz – the implications are grotesque
JEEZE! The way some simple minded folks use CC as a universal bogey man, instead of really thinking and doing real science.
They’re not really “simple minded folks”.
They’re ideologists who pursue an agenda of world governance by the few (them) of the masses (us).
“You will own nothing and be happy” as the WEF cabal intoned.
Possibly the same gang that killed the Mungo Men in Australia. But you will find it hard to trace that as further research has been banned.
I find it really offensive that militant aboriginals and their university ”trained” supporters bemoan the
slaughter of their people by the early settlers but make no mention of the same slaughter of their fellows before any trace of white people set foot on ”their” land – and for the same reason -resources. Humans are humans. Always was always will be
aboriginal landland for the taking.Same stance for American Indians living such peaceful pastoral lives with nary a discourage word in earshot.
Same for slavery. Slavery existed in many countries including Africa well before white men arrived on the scene.
Not that I am excusing enslaving people, the act is abhorrent to me
The Arab slave trade spanned from the 7th to the 20th Century and began in Africa hundreds of years before the Atlantic slave trade started but the latter gets all the attention.
A lot of that slave trade was captured Europeans thus the origin of “white slavery.”
In the Americas, more than 40 genera of large mammals (ie whole families) went extinct between 40 and 10 thousand years ago. It is silly to think it is all due to humans. If it was, you would find bones of them butchered in human occupation sites. All there is is a half dozen sites with mammoth bones. Where are the ground sloths and giant armadillos that are easy to catch?
Fascinating lecture on extinct giant mammals.
There are ground sloth kill sites in North and South America, plus camel and horse kill sites, with buffalo jumps of extinct bison species in North America.
The last ground sloths died out on Caribbean islands only when humans arrived about 4000 years ago, like the mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Arctic.
The megafauna had survived repeated interglacials before. Modern humans did it, unless you believe in dozens of coincidences.
If large animals only have one offspring every 5 years, a hunting human tribe can cause their extinction over a few hundred years….but for the most part, I think the disease theory wins….why go out hunting a Sabre-toothed tiger when you can chase buffalo off a cliff rather easily (buffalo still aren’t extinct), or fish or pick berries. On the other hand having a dog to chase one away seems like an excellent idea.
Road kill took out a lot of them.
Bowled over by mastodons running to higher ground to escape the sudden sea rise that methane emissions from dinosaur farts caused.
(C’mon, this is as good a supposition as anything else being postulated)
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
We could assume the die off of large animals was mostly due to new diseases brought by lice on human pets.
Along the lines of European diseases killing off 85% of American Indigenous population leaving the remainder in the various apocalypse-like conditions reported by frontiersmen.
Climate change is boring me to death.
It’s amazing what CO2 can do
Climate change has caused the extinction of uncountable species. The present question is whether current climate variation is anthropogenic and caused by CO2.
The evidence is less than persuasive.
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 is in dry air 425 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contains 0.839 g of CO2 and has a mass of 1.29 kg at STP. This small amount of CO2 can heat up such a large mass of air by only a very small amount if at all.
In air with a temperature of 70 deg F and with 70% RH, the concentration of H2O is
14,780 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contains 11.9 g 0f H2O, 0.78 g of CO2, and
has a mass 1.20 kg. To the first approximation and all things being equal, the amount iof the greenhouse effect (GHE) is given by:
GHE = moles H2O/moles H2O+moles CO2= 0.66/0.66+0.019= 0.97 or 97%
This calculation assumes that a molecule of H2O and a molecule of CO2 each absorb about the same amount of IR energy. H2O covers 71% of the earth’s surface, and it is always the main greenhouse gas by far
The above empirical data show that the claim by the IPCC that CO2 causes global warming is deliberate lie. The objective of this lie is to provide the UN the justification to distribute funds from the donor funds, via the UNFCCC, and the UN COP, from the rich countries to the poor countries to help them cope with global warming and climate change. At the recent COP29 conference in Baku, the poor countries came clamoring not for billions but trillions of funds. The poor countries left the conference empty handed withe no pledges of funds from the rich countries.
When the EPA CO2 endangerment finding is rescinded by President Trump’s EO, all this rhetoric about greenhouse emission, global warming and climate change will vanish overnight.
What did you think I meant? The evidence for anthropogenic climate effect is not persuasive. Don’t know how it could be plainer.
You keep posting this same thing in thread after thread. It is wrong. Most of the atmospheric air column is too cold for water vapor to be present in any quantities. You can’t take a slice at earth surface and use that to represent the entire air column.
Second, its not about how much each molecule can absorb. Its about how much each molecule can absorb and then xfer that energy either by collision or by emission. That happens over and over again, the molecules don’t get full, they don’t get tired, and they don’t wear out.
The endangerment finding was BS. But let’s enter the debate with solid science on our side.
I post this comment to inform new comers to this site that H2O is the major greenhouse gas and that CO2 does not cause global warming as claimed by the IPCC which has been perpetrating the greatest scientific fraud since the Piltdown Man. A great many people, especially the politicians, still believe that CO2 is a dangerous gas and fossil fuels must be phased out.
Look what this fraud has done to the economies of the UK and Germany, for example. In California, Gov. Gavin N. wants to phase out cars and light trucks with gas engines by 2035. This is crazy.
I live in Burnaby, BC where the carbon tax is $80 per tonne of CO2eq. On April 1 the tax goes $95 per tonne of CO2eq. This tax has caused a great increase in the cost of everything, especially food.
Trudeau allowed Canada to participate in a WEF carbon tax experiment (because he believes in Climageddon, as a result of being STEM incompetent, not passing midterms in 1st year Engineering school, and moving on to the drama department for his post secondary degree, where fooling people while on stage is what is considered high performance). In Politics, he has found out the hard way that people don’t like to pay taxes for heating their houses and driving to work…and they found his promises to return it to them for “no net money out of their pockets” to be the money redistribution scam it was intended to be, just didn’t seem to achieve it’s environmental goals.
Harold the Organic Chemist Says:
RE: Greenhouse Gases
RE: H2O vs CO2
Shown in Fig. 7 (See below) is the IR absorption spectrum of Philadelphia city air from 400 to 4,000 wavenumbers (wn’s). Integration of the spectrum determined that H2O absorbed 92% of the IR light and CO2 only 8%. Since the air sample was inner city air, it is likely that the concentration of CO2 was greater than that at remote location such as the countryside or ocean. This is an important unknown. There also H2O absorptions from 400 to 200
wn,s. The spectrometer has a cut off at 400 wn’s.
The gas cell for measurement of IR absorption spectrum of the city air was a 7 cm Al cylinder with KCl windows.
Th absorbance of the CO2 peak at ca. 600 wn’s is ca 0.025. If the cell was 700 cm in length, the absorbance would be 2.5 and 99+% of the IR light would be absorbed. For the CO2 peak at ca. 2350 wn’s, the absorbance is ca. 0.033. If the cell ca. 600 cm in length 99% of the IR light would be absorbed.
For the tallest H2O peak at ca 1,600 wn’s, the absorbance is 0.064. If the cell ca. 330 cm in length, the absorbance would be 3 and 99.9% of the IR light would be absorbed.
These rough calculations show that the primary greenhouse effect takes place in the first 20 ft or so.
Fig 7. was taken from the essay: “Climate Change Reexamined by
Joel M. Kauffman. The essay is 26 pages and can be down loaded for free.
Correction: The windows for the gas cell were KBr not KCl.
I post this comment to inform new comers to this site that H2O is the major greenhouse gas and CO2 does not cause global warming. There are a great many people, especially politicians, who have been led to believe that CO2 is dangerous greenhouse gas that is going to destroy the earth unless fossil fuels are phased out.
Look how this CO2 global warming and climate change scare has affected the UK, Germany, and Australia. In California, Gov. Gavin N. wants to phase out all cars and light trucks with gas engines by 2025. This is crazy! In New York, the Climate Act has required by 2030 70% of the electricity is to be generated by PV solar panels and wind turbines. This will never happen due to the large amount of land that must be purchased.
I live in Burnaby, BC where the carbon tax is $80 per tonne of CO2eq. The tax will increase to $95 per tonne of CO2eg on April 1. The carbon tax has greatly increased the cost of everything, especially food, except electricity. In BC, 97% of the electricity is generated by hydro power.
Correction: 2025 should be 2035
Harold, nice graph, but you have to know the length of the beam over which you are absorbing the IR to come up with any meaningful numbers for Beer’s law.
https://www.utm.mx/postgrado/MCPNyAl/Evaluacion2014/C1-Estructura%20y%20personal%20academico/1.2%20Proceso%20de%20ensenianza-aprendizaje/1.2.2%20Evaluacion%20del%20desempenio%20academico/MIM/Articulos/Infrarrojo/ATR-FTIR.pdf
I’m not sure what you are asking. Could you reframe you question?
No, it won’t. There are way too many people invested in CAWG / CCC to just let it die. They will continue to tell the stories in hopes of resurrecting the movement under the next favorable Government.
I’ve seen videos of current ‘roos attacking humans (due mostly to humans annoying them). I can only imagine the early humans in Australia must have been wary of those really big ‘roos.
Nah. They used to mesmerize the giant roos by pointing 3 fingers at them, just like Crocodile Dundee did with the wild water buffalo.
(ps – don’t try this at home, kids)
Actually it is only partially correct. They only used one finger, the index one, and it was aligned in an upward motion towards the critter. This early hunter technique is still used today by their descendants when warding off politicians.
Politicians can’t count that high.
Generally we avoid each other. Roos usually won’t attack unless they feel threatened, but if they do attack they can be deadly. There are big roos all over the grounds of my kid’s school, the kids learn at an early age not to bother them. The rare Roos which show unusual aggression tend to vanish without explanation.
With all the demands for ‘truth telling’ in Australia, this is a truth that will never see the light of day.
Early aboriginal arrivers in Australia started straight into a diet of the larger slower-moving marsupials. As the animals became extinct, they moved on to the smaller more agile ones until a balance was achieved. As a result, the Aboriginal population was rather small and isolated.
Are you saying that Aboriginals wiped-out a whole species (and probably many others)
That doesn’t sit well with them being “custodians” of the land and nature, does it. !
It’s called cleanup in aisle 3.
This article needs at least one kangaroo recipe.
I’ve tried kangaroo and wallaby, found them a bit “gamey”, so to speak. (cooked at restaurants or fairs).
Did have a really nice kangaroo sausage once at the Tocal Field Day, though.
Much prefer a nice beef steak.
Roo recipes are like the galah recipe.
Take 1 very large pot of water.
Add 2 large rocks and 1 galah.
Bring to a boil, then keep on the boil.
Check the rocks for signs of softening.
When the rocks are soft, discard the galah and eat the rocks
and if you’re in a desert with no rocks, you can use an axe head instead
You can make a tasty ragu with roo meat
Kangaroo tail soup is delicious. We had it as kids but haven’t seen it for decades.
Kangaroo meat is available in major supermarkets. It is a very lean meat is as best cooked by searing on a hot plate for a short time i.e. rare. Don’t overcook it or it will toughen. good in stir fries.
Best used raw for feeding my dogs.
That is exactly where a lot of road kill ends up !
Obviously, Darwin was short sighted in not attributing all evolution on earth, ever, to anthropogenic climate change. It would have saved him a trip — he could have stayed home in Blighty and napped by the coal fire in between writing fiction, just like these modern blokes do.
Peer-reviewed fiction at that.
Lol. I’m shocked!
I am not aware of any aboriginal groups knowing how to cure skins and turn them into leather. In the colder southern regions they would clean kangaroo, or preferably possum, skins and drape them over their shoulders for warmth but that was about it. Mostly, they were entirely naked.
When the most recent arrivals reached the mainland a mere 3500 years ago, they brought with them the domestic dog from SE Asia (which can still be seen in Indonesian villages etc). In Australia, it went feral and became the dingo. This animal proceeded to outcompete the marsupial carnivores and wiped them out, which is why they survived only in Tasmania.
The aboriginal industry here in Australia denies the evidence that shows they did not all arrive at the same time because that would undermine their claims. However, genetic analysis of the dingo tells us pretty precisely when it arrived her and separated from its Asian parentage. This also coincides timewise with the sudden appearance of a very different stone technology that is identical with that found on Sulawesi. Linguistic analysis of the Pama-Nguyan language group, the dominant one in Australia, shows that its divergence into numerous dialects (not distinct languages as previously thought) can be traced back to 3500BP. There was also a marked population surge at 3500BP. The evidence is pretty compelling that the great majority of today’s aborigines descended from these “invaders”. All we need to close the case is genetic studies – but guess which groups are fiercely opposed to that happening.
Yes, the dogs had fleas and the fleas had disease that infected the megafauna….but I said that already in a post somewhere here on WUWT today….
It’s an old debate-
Death of the megafauna
Humans killed the megafauna: new evidence › News in Science (ABC Science)
Megafires bumped off the Megafauna according to Tim Flannery before the climate dooming became more in vogue-
Sparks fly in megafauna debate › News in Science (ABC Science)
Bit of a Catch22 for our ex Climate Commissioner Tim because naturally the usual suspects wanted to pin everything on climate change and not point any finger at the left’s noble savage meme with the green aboriginals living in perfect harmony with Gaia instead of torching the joint for hunting purposes.
PS: It’s called ‘cultural burning’ nowadays by the woke idiots and any aboriginal dna trumps years of experience with any country fire fighting authority of course-
Cultural Burning | WWF-Australia | Cultural Burning | WWF Australia
Who’s hunting whom?
So, are we now faced with financial compensation to the descendants?
Don’t let the history re-writers read my post.
“…Australia, which lost 90% of its large species by 40,000 years ago, more than half of them kangaroos”
I thought it was the swagman that done it.