Hominids are not to blame for loss of mega-fauna
For decades, hominids such as Homo erectus of several million years ago and their descendants and parentage have been blamed for having hunted the large and varied megaherbivore population of Africa (with individuals weighing up to 900K) into extinction, thanks to their use of tools. This patently questionable paradigm has now been laid to rest by a team of researchers centered at University of Utah in an article published in Science magazine. According to the researchers, it was the decrease of atmospheric carbon dioxyde, CO2, beginning 4.6 million years ago, which brought about their disappearance.
Although the scientists do not consider the possibility of catastrophes affecting the atmosphere and fauna during this time-span, nor offer any cause for the drop in CO2 (neither of which would have been accessible to them from the data they were examining), another recent article in the magazine Astrobiology considers the possibility of a Supernova triggering mass extinctions of large marine animal species at the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary 2.6 million years ago (600,000 years after Lucy), in showers of iron particles and DNA-damaging muons.
New research disputes a long-held view that our earliest tool-bearing ancestors contributed to the demise of large mammals in Africa over the last several million years. Instead, the researchers argue that long-term environmental change drove the extinctions, mainly in the form of grassland expansion likely caused by falling atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels.
Tyler Faith, curator of archaeology at the Natural History Museum of Utah and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah, led the study. The research team also includes John Rowan from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Andrew Du from the University of Chicago, and Paul Koch from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
"Despite decades of literature asserting that early hominins impacted ancient African faunas, there have been few attempts to actually test this scenario or to explore alternatives," Faith says. "We think our study is a major step towards understanding the depth of anthropogenic impacts on large mammal communities, and provides a convincing counter-argument to these long-held views about our early ancestors."
To test for ancient hominin impacts, the researchers compiled a seven-million-year record of herbivore extinctions in eastern Africa, focusing on the very largest species, the so-called 'megaherbivores' (species over 2,000 lbs.) Though only five megaherbivores exist in Africa today, there was a much greater diversity in the past. For example, three-million-year-old 'Lucy' (Australopithecus afarensis) shared her woodland landscape with three giraffes, two rhinos, a hippo, and four elephant-like species at Hadar, Ethiopia.
When and why these species disappeared has long been a mystery for archaeologists and paleontologists, despite the evolution of tool-using and meat-eating hominins getting most of the blame.
"Our analyses show that there is a steady, long-term decline of megaherbivore diversity beginning around 4.6 million years ago. This extinction process kicks in over a million years before the very earliest evidence for human ancestors making tools or butchering animal carcasses and well before the appearance of any hominin species realistically capable of hunting them, like Homo erectus," says Faith.
Faith and his team quantified long-term changes in eastern African megaherbivores using a dataset of more than 100 fossil assemblages spanning the last seven million years. The team also examined independent records of climatic and environmental trends and their effects, specifically global atmospheric CO2, stable carbon isotope records of vegetation structure, and stable carbon isotopes of eastern African fossil herbivore teeth, among others.
Their analysis reveals that over the last seven million years substantial megaherbivore extinctions occurred: 28 lineages became extinct, leading to the present-day communities lacking in large animals. These results highlight the great diversity of ancient megaherbivore communities, with many having far more megaherbivore species than exist today across Africa as a whole.
Further analysis showed that the onset of the megaherbivore decline began roughly 4.6 million years ago, and that the rate of diversity decline did not change following the appearance of Homo erectus, a human ancestor often blamed for the extinctions. Rather, Faith's team argues that climate is more likely culprit.
"The key factor in the Plio-Pleistocene megaherbivore decline seems to be the expansion of grasslands, which is likely related to a global drop in atmospheric CO2 over the last five million years," says John Rowan, a postdoctoral scientist from University of Massachusetts Amherst. "Low CO2 levels favor tropical grasses over trees, and as a consequence savannas became less woody and more open through time. We know that many of the extinct megaherbivores fed on woody vegetation, so they seem to disappear alongside their food source."
The loss of massive herbivores may also account for other extinctions that have also been attributed to ancient hominins. Some scientist suggest that competition with increasingly carnivorous species of Homo led to the demise of numerous carnivores over the last few million years. Faith and his team suggest an alternative.
"We know there are also major extinctions among African carnivores at this time and that some of them, like saber-tooth cats, may have specialized on very large prey, perhaps juvenile elephants" says Paul Koch. "It could be that some of these carnivores disappeared with their megaherbivore prey."
"Looking at all of the potential drivers of the megaherbivore decline, our analyses suggest that changing climate and environment played the key role in Africa's past extinctions," said Faith. "It follows that in the search for ancient hominin impacts on ancient African ecosystems, we must focus our attention on the one species known to be capable of causing them -- us, Homo sapiens, over the last 300,000 years."
A Supernova responsible for the extinction of large marine mammals at the dawn of the Pleistocene?
About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus.
The effects of such a supernova -- and possibly more than one -- on large ocean life are detailed in a paper just published in Astrobiology.
"I've been doing research like this for about 15 years, and always in the past it's been based on what we know generally about the universe -- that these supernovae should have affected Earth at some time or another," said lead author Adrian Melott, professor emeritus of physics & astronomy at the University of Kansas. "This time, it's different. We have evidence of nearby events at a specific time. We know about how far away they were, so we can actually compute how that would have affected the Earth and compare it to what we know about what happened at that time -- it's much more specific."
Melott said recent papers revealing ancient seabed deposits of iron-60 isotopes provided the "slam-dunk" evidence of the timing and distance of supernovae.
"As far back as the mid-1990s, people said, 'Hey, look for iron-60. It's a telltale because there's no other way for it to get to Earth but from a supernova.' Because iron-60 is radioactive, if it was formed with the Earth it would be long gone by now. So, it had to have been rained down on us. There's some debate about whether there was only one supernova really nearby or a whole chain of them. I kind of favor a combo of the two -- a big chain with one that was unusually powerful and close. If you look at iron-60 residue, there's a huge spike 2.6 million years ago, but there's excess scattered clear back 10 million years."
Melott's co-authors were Franciole Marinho of Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos in Brazil and Laura Paulucci of Universidade Federal do ABC, also in Brazil.
According to the team, other evidence for a series of supernovae is found in the very architecture of the local universe.
"We have the Local Bubble in the interstellar medium," Melott said. "We're right on its edge. It's a giant region about 300 light years long. It's basically very hot, very low-density gas -- nearly all the gas clouds have been swept out of it. The best way to manufacture a bubble like that is a whole bunch of supernovae blows it bigger and bigger, and that seems to fit well with idea of a chain. When we do calculations, they're based on the idea that one supernova that goes off, and its energy sweeps by Earth, and it's over. But with the Local Bubble, the cosmic rays kind of bounce off the sides, and the cosmic-ray bath would last 10,000 to 100,000 years. This way, you could imagine a whole series of these things feeding more and more cosmic rays into the Local Bubble and giving us cosmic rays for millions of years."
Whether or not there was one supernova or a series of them, the supernova energy that spread layers of iron-60 all over the world also caused penetrating particles called muons to shower Earth, causing cancers and mutations -- especially to larger animals.
"The best description of a muon would be a very heavy electron -- but a muon is a couple hundred times more massive than an electron," Melott said. "They're very penetrating. Even normally, there are lots of them passing through us. Nearly all of them pass through harmlessly, yet about one-fifth of our radiation dose comes by muons. But when this wave of cosmic rays hits, multiply those muons by a few hundred. Only a small faction of them will interact in any way, but when the number is so large and their energy so high, you get increased mutations and cancer -- these would be the main biological effects. We estimated the cancer rate would go up about 50 percent for something the size of a human -- and the bigger you are, the worse it is. For an elephant or a whale, the radiation dose goes way up."
A supernova 2.6 million years ago may be related to a marine megafaunal extinction at the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary where 36 percent of the genera were estimated to become extinct. The extinction was concentrated in coastal waters, where larger organisms would catch a greater radiation dose from the muons.
According to the authors of the new paper, damage from muons would extend down hundreds of yards into ocean waters, becoming less severe at greater depths: "High energy muons can reach deeper in the oceans being the more relevant agent of biological damage as depth increases," they write.
Indeed, a famously large and fierce marine animal inhabiting shallower waters may have been doomed by the supernova radiation.
"One of the extinctions that happened 2.6 million years ago was Megalodon," Melott said. "Imagine the Great White Shark in 'Jaws,' which was enormous -- and that's Megalodon, but it was about the size of a school bus. They just disappeared about that time. So, we can speculate it might have something to do with the muons. Basically, the bigger the creature is the bigger the increase in radiation would have been."
The KU researcher said the evidence of a supernova, or series of them, is "another puzzle piece" to clarify the possible reasons for the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary extinction.
"There really hasn't been any good explanation for the marine megafaunal extinction," Melott said. "This could be one. It's this paradigm change -- we know something happened and when it happened, so for the first time we can really dig in and look for things in a definite way. We now can get really definite about what the effects of radiation would be in a way that wasn't possible before."
ScienceDaily, December 11, 2018
Journal Reference:
Adrian L. Melott, Franciole Marinho, Laura Paulucci. Hypothesis: Muon Radiation Dose and Marine Megafaunal Extinction at the End-Pliocene Supernova. Astrobiology, 2018; DOI: 10.1089/ast.2018.1902
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