On another post Dan wrote:
"And they invest countless hours looking for ghosts, gnomes, sun spots, anything other than the dread taking of personal responsibility by the planet's inhabitants for the mess were are making."
Seems we are also not prepared to look at the possibility we have been doing it for a long time.
Wolfman mentioned "Modern Man, with his superior brain". What evidence do you have that this is so? Technologically superior more likely. But that's another argument. Neanderthals must have been quite capable of surviving the presence of the cave bear. I'd agree with the idea that modern man took a long time to gain a foothold in Europe simply because Neanderthals were already there. They already filled the ecological niche.
Humans would hardly have faced a mammoth alone. Teamwork is what it's all about. As the Doc says small populations are vulnerable to extinction through disasters or inbreeding. This is a problem modern conservationists face all the time. If herds of mammoths were broken into small groups, either by hunting or fires, humans need not have actually killed the last one.
Of course mammoths and sloths were not the only things that died out soon after humans arrived in America. A short list: horses, camels, several species of deer, an antelope related to the pronghorn, giant armadillo, giant beaver, sabertooth and other cats, two types of peccary, tapir, large wolf, two more elephant-type creatures, giant tortoises and many species of birds. all gone within a thousand years of each other. Of course climate change may have been responsible but again it seems strange they had survived previous drastic climate changes but this time they failed to adjust.
Wolfman, close to your home although you may already be aware of this. It is fairly old:
http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/pleins_textes_7/divers2/010020760.pdfAs DocT says the correlation is more obvious on small islands but the correlation exists on continents as well. Here is a more recent comparison between the two. Of course we could say because Paul Martin co-wrote it it's going to be biased:
http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/donlan/readings/Steadman%20and%20Martin%202003.pdf
