The myth of the wise, "Noble Savage" the indigenous Man living
in perfect harmony with nature, beloved by Gaia-worshippers and
cultural anti-modernists, has taken another whacking.
Australian Aborigines have long been held up and extolled in
innumerable museum displays, children's literature and other
popular culture as a paradigm example of a people whose mystic
relationship with the land and its creatures led them to preserve a
perfect balance with the environment and the creatures in it,
unlike the rapacious, Gaia-raping, property-conscious and
destructive white settlers (a myth which a number of Aborigines who
I know treat with some cynicism).
Now fresh evidence has emerged to reinforce what many scientists
have long suspected: that it was human hunting, not climate change,
that wiped out the giant beasts in Australia -- the megafauna --
about 46,400 years ago, as also seems to have happened when humans
reached South America, New Zealand, and Madagascar.
"There's no way you can twist the evidence to say that climate
change was responsible," said Dr. Gavin Prideaux, Rio Tinto
Research Fellow at the Western Australian Museum. Until the time
humans arrived, the great animals were flourishing.
"They were coping very well, thank you very much," Professor
Bert Roberts, a dating expert at NSW's University of Wollongong,
was quoted as saying. "That's not to say climate didn't have an
influence, but they always bounced back despite stresses from
droughts and difficult conditions. Then people come along when the
conditions were good and the megabeasts go extinct. It's definitely
people (who were the cause)".
Among the creatures wiped out were giant claw-footed kangaroos,
Sthenurines, that weighed up to 300kg, the 100kg Genyornis, the
heaviest bird ever known, a marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex,
which could grow to the size of a large leopard, the diprodoton, a
herbivore the size of a hippopotamus, and giant reptiles (one of
these last, a huge lizard that probably inhabited water-holes, and
whose skeleton looks terrifying enough, may have given rise to the
Aboriginal legend of the dreaded bunyip).
Dr. Prideaux and colleagues recently published the results of
research among rich fossil-beds in the Thylacoleo Caves of
southeastern Australia, which support the evidence of discoveries
elsewhere. Until the arrival of humans the giant creatures had been
flourishing and were largely unthreatened by climate change.
The new finds support the "blitzkrieg" hypothesis of U.S.
geoscientist Paul Martin and others that when the Aborigines
arrived in the new continent rich with huge animals, they rapidly
hunted them to extinction.
The Australian megafauna included a few large carnivorous
marsupials, but most of the creatures were herbivores, unable,
unlike many African animals, to defend themselves from
spear-wielding hunters. In any event, with the herbivores
destroyed, the whole food-chain was broken and the carnivores died
too.
The big herbivores wouldn't have stood much chance if the
Aborigines of 46,000 years ago were anything like their
descendants. Though many Aborigines are urbanized now, the hunting
abilities of tribal Aborigines can be, quite literally, fantastic.
I have done some trips in the outback with an Aboriginal law-giver
steeped in real hunting lore and seem him display hunting skills
almost impossible to believe, including not only amazing
spear-throwing but also finding, unerringly, snakes and lizards in
pitch darkness (for example reaching up from a tiny rocking boat to
pick venomous snakes like fruit from the rafters inside a flooding
house). I won't say he was in telepathic communication with the
quarry, only that that's what it looked like.
Professor Roberts has published evidence from 28 megafauna sites
that indicate a continent-wide extinction of large creatures when
Aborigines arrived.
Other scientists have argued that as well as hunting, the
Aboriginals fired the landscape, destroying the megafauna's
ecosystems, and helping the desertification of large parts of
Australia. There was no idea of conservation or animal husbandry,
and 90% of the large fauna disappeared. Of course, even if the
early hunter-gatherer had been inclined to farming, it's hard to
know how such giant marsupials could have been farmed or husbanded
-- it would not be exactly easy to corral herds of giant kangaroos,
for example. One West Australian politician tried to set up a
possum-farm on an island after European settlement but the venture
came to nothing, and in 1973 the Whitlam government, among its many
bizarre and irrational schemes, tried to set up Aborigines in the
far north in turtle-farming, with predictable results.
The debate is probably not over yet, however (some suggest there
was more than one cause of the extinction), and there are
ideological and metapolitical implications beyond the realm of pure
science. The notion of the wise, environmentally conscious indigene
seems in conflict with the notion of human beings in general as the
enemy of Gaia, and there are ideological constituencies ready to
capitalize on both.
Anyway, by the time British settlers arrived, apart from a few
big kangaroos, most of Australia's surviving marsupials were small
and in general elusive and/or desert-dwelling -- wallabies,
wombats, bandicoots, koalas and rat and mouse-sized creatures.
Europeans were probably responsible for the final extinction of
some creatures, the best-known example being the Tasmanian
marsupial wolf or tiger (the last known died in captivity in the
1930s), and, until the trade was banned, hundreds of thousands of
cute, cuddly koalas were shot every year for their skins. There
have also been disastrous instances of over-clearing, destruction
of scarce wetlands, and a European contribution to desertification,
as well as the introduction of cats, rats, rabbits and foxes since
the first European settlement in 1788.
However, European settlers also unintentionally helped the
survival of many native species by introducing large-scale
irrigation and edible crops. They also, of course, began dedicated
conservation initiatives, sanctuaries, national parks and zoo
breeding programs from the 19th century onwards.
topics:
Trade, Environment, Law, Africa
