Sydney - It was not climate change that wiped out Australia's giant
animals 40 000 years ago, but the spears and clubs of the first
settlers, researchers said on Friday.
What did for the megafauna -
rhino-sized wombats, birds twice as big as emus, claw-footed kangaroos
and massive marsupial lions - has been fiercely debated for almost 100
years.
But now blame for the disappearance of the 2.5-ton
diprotodon and around 50 other megafauna species has been laid at the
door of the first humans who arrived on the continent from Asia, in a
scientific finding that will be unpalatable to some.
The
University of Tasmania's Chris Johnson led a team that analysed fungal
spores dating back 130 000 years taken from sediment cores drilled out
of a swamp at Lynch's Crater in the Atherton Tablelands in north
Queensland.
They found that spores of the fungi that thrive in
the dung of large herbivores like the diprotodon were widespread until
around 41 000 years ago, with samples younger than that showing no
traces of the spores.
Factors
Their study provides
the best evidence yet that the megafauna were doing fine when the humans
arrived, around that time, but died out not long after.
"People hunted them in big numbers and made them go extinct," Professor Johnson said.
He and his colleagues hope that their discoveries, published in the magazine Science, will finally put to bed the notion that a change in climate caused the extinction.
But
University of Melbourne researcher Matt Cupper, a specialist in carbon
dating, said the jury was still out on whether the megafauna were wiped
out through hunting.
"We've not ever found the smoking gun," he
said. "A combination of factors could be involved, with climate change
weakening the animals and making them more susceptible to extinction."
For
others in the field, like botanist Matt McGlone from the New Zealand
government's Landcare Research outfit, Johnson's paper is definitive and
the debate is now over.
"That's the message to the world: When
humans arrive on a landscape on a new country they put enormous pressure
on animals heavier than 10kg and a lot of them go extinct. It may have
taken a short time or a longish time in Australia but it happened and it
would have happened without any other intervention in the way of
climate, disease, fire, whatever," he said.
Fresh research
Johnson's
research team found sediment samples spanning back over 80 000 years
that, through carbon dating, showed two climate changes in the glacial
cycle but the megafauna weathering both.
Those who blame the
country's first human inhabitants have sometimes been accused of racism.
And some have argued that it is incomprehensible that small bands of
hunters with nothing more than sticks and stones could have wiped out so
many massive beasts.
Johnson notes that some took that
fallacious view of whaling: How could small bands of whalers affect
numbers in the planet's vast oceans?
"But those whale populations
are replacing themselves very slowly," Johnson said. "Even if you go
out and harvest 2% of them, they'll soon become extinct."
The
fresh research is less definitive about that other great controversy in
Australia's environmental history: Whether it was fire or the
extinctions that led to mixed rainforest giving way to the grassy
eucalypt-dominated savannah that now covers much of the country.
It
could be that the absence of the giant herbivores caused more grass to
grow and the increase in the fuel load led to more and bigger fires.
McGlone
may agree with Johnson's theory of the cause of the megafauna
extinction, but he is not convinced that was the cause of the changes to
the landscape. "I think it was human fire," he said.
Based on that scenario, not only did humans change the fauna, McGlone said, they changed the flora too.
- SAPA