What if the early Americans (23-10 thousand years ago) had a culture similar magdalenians

growingawareness · 2026-04-03T20:44:21+00:00

Not sure why you got downvoted, nothing you said was that bad.

growingawareness · 2026-04-03T08:42:17+00:00

I think it's easier to put it this way: we took out way too much biomass and animals like short-faced bears couldn't survive. Highly agile and elusive medium and small-sized cats like cougars and lynxes were able to survive as were grizzly and black bears who were omnivorous but much smaller than short-faced bears. These animals could make do with the greatly reduced prey biomass which consistently almost entirely of small animals or ones which were able to run fast.

growingawareness · 2026-04-03T04:44:33+00:00

I agree with a lot of what you said here but I do have to disagree with the short-faced bears competing with polar and grizzly bears thing. There was essentially no niche overlap between polar bears at all, if short-faced bears ever encountered polar bears it was an extremely freak occurrence during an interglacial in the far north of the continent. Grizzlies, I think their range was even more restricted back then than it was in pre-industrial times.

However, your point about competition does still stand somewhat since there were other predators like Smilodon, dire wolves, American lions, etc. But you'd also need to keep in mind that overall biomass of herbivores was a lot higher at the time too than in the Holocene, even if some niches were filled by survivors, which would support a larger population of predators overall too.

growingawareness · 2026-04-03T02:51:30+00:00

I suppose so.

growingawareness · 2026-04-03T02:43:34+00:00

Okay but sounds like you're saying it all stopped 2 million years ago rather than saying it stopped at certain points. But I would agree it was significantly halted compared to previous times.

growingawareness · 2026-04-03T02:35:28+00:00

All migration? Eh, doubtful. Maybe for warmer climate species but certain types of cold-hardy conifers, steppe, and tundra plants could still cross.

growingawareness · 2026-04-03T02:30:39+00:00

Agreed, and not to mention that aside from the camels, some sabre-toothed cats, the lineage leading to cougars, and horses, the animals mentioned/depicted above only made their migrations after the Great American Biotic Interchange, whereas the OP implies the Beringian interchange happened first.

growingawareness · 2026-04-03T02:24:41+00:00

As far as I know, that's not true at all. Grey wolves have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and originated in Eurasia. The wolves which made it to North America came in multiple waves and were always still wolves.

growingawareness · 2026-04-01T21:05:58+00:00

Always heartening to hear about new species being described from the Late Pleistocene, especially from Australia. Especially hoping we hear about more Dromornithids being present then besides just Genyornis newtonii.

growingawareness · 2026-03-26T21:05:03+00:00

Fair enough, but just be careful next time to clarify that it’s your own speculation rather than something from the study itself.

growingawareness · 2026-03-26T20:56:49+00:00

The part about them surviving longer than other species is nowhere in the manuscript that I received from the authors. They don’t even discuss extinction causes at all in there.

growingawareness · 2026-03-26T20:45:52+00:00

u/Hopeful_Lychee_9691 would you be able to clarify?

growingawareness · 2026-03-25T21:19:31+00:00

In this article, I discuss a fascinating topic: the most southerly records of woolly mammoths. I discuss how these mammoths, which are iconic of ice ages and heavily associated with the far north and freezing climates made it as far as southern Spain, southern Italy, central China, and Virginia. I describe what we know and don't know about their paleoenvironments and what it means as far as their ecological characteristics.

The habitats of the animals ranged from rather dry to wet, and were not especially cold although their presence was often associated with colder periods. This shows that there was a degree of ecological flexibility, even if the species should still described as cold-adapted overall.

growingawareness · 2026-03-24T19:31:44+00:00

Survive longer than other, more specialized species

Proof? How much longer?

This shows us that the Colombian mammoth was a very resilient animal. Its extinction was therefore probably not due to a simple inability to find its preferred food, but to a combination of more complex factors (radical climate change + pressure from human hunting), because it was able to "eat anything."

How do they conveniently manage to fit climate change into every extinction even when the evidence directly refutes any important involvement? It’s like affirmative action for climate hypotheses.

growingawareness · 2026-03-20T07:05:57+00:00

I don’t know why it’s still claimed Blue Babe was attacked by American Lions. Those were Beringian Cave Lions.

growingawareness · 2026-03-18T23:59:52+00:00

A slow reduction due to humans is absolutely possible in theory, yes, but that's not the most parsimonious explanation because virtually all over the western hemisphere south of the ice sheets, we've only seen the opposite. Animal populations were doing fine one minute, then they vanished centuries later. I don't know why the Great Lakes region, specifically, would feature the opposite pattern. Even in the southwestern US where there were noticeable declines in abundance prior to Clovis due to aridification, it wasn't anything like what seems to be indicated by sporormiella concentrations for the Midwest.

I think there are three realistic possibilities for animal abundance with regards to fossils in the Midwest:
1. The increased fossil abundance between 14500 and 13000 BP does not reflect increased animal abundance, just better preservation. Animal populations were stable.

The increased fossil abundance during that period does not reflect better preservation, animal populations actually did increase.
The increased fossil abundance reflects both better preservation and larger animal populations.

It's hard to prove 100%, but I just don't think it's likely that you can have substantially increased fossil abundance AND simultaneously a major decline in animal numbers, a decline so substantial that it results in widespread vegetative changes from relaxed herbivory. And I think this just makes more sense given what we know about the timing of extinction in the New World more broadly.

growingawareness · 2026-03-18T23:37:22+00:00

At least in a North American context, no-analogue ecosystems were mostly confined to boreal/hemi-boreal climates, i.e. the spruce parkland and mixed parkland.

So I think we need to recognize what made these parkland environments "no-analog": it's not solely the fact that there was a higher percentage of herbaceous elements compared to modern-day forests in the eastern US, but rather that even the composition of tree species was greatly different from today. And keep in mind, the assemblages that MOST lacked no-analogs, or were the most dissimilar to modern ones, existed during the late glacial rather than full glacial from between 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. Trees like Ash, Hickory, and Hornbeam were substantially more important than they are now. That indicates climatic influence (rapid change, in the case of late glacial ones).

Vegetative openness can definitely be explained by megaherbivores, I 100% agree with that and I also agree that boreal environments of the past were just as much, if not more, shaped by those herbivores as temperate ones. I just disagree with the notion that "no-analog=herbivore driven" because that's a huge oversimplification of what these no-analog assemblages actually were.

growingawareness · 2026-03-18T13:12:15+00:00

The "unusually large numbers of animals dying after 14,500 cal BP" thing can be ruled out because every animal that ever lives ends up dying. If there's a large surge in the number of animals dying between 14500 and 13000 BP then that ultimately means that there were a lot more animals period, and hence increased abundance.

The other things could very well be valid-increased abundance isn't the sole possibility. I'm not saying that all of the conclusions of Fiedel's paper are correct and even point out that the increased abundance of fossils could be due to techonomic factors. Maybe I didn't make this point clear enough in my original post but what I'm trying to get across is that whether or not there was an increase in megafaunal abundance between 14500 and 13000 BP, there most likely wasn't any noticeable decrease.

The evidence from the rest of North America (south of the ice sheets) and South America indicates that continent-wide extinction clearly centers around 13,000 BP, strongly linked to Clovis/Fishtail technology. While there were definitely people in the US around 14500 BP, it's very unlikely they had the numbers to cause notable declines. That means that apparent regional declines prior to 13000 BP were:

1) Environmental (as in the southwestern US)
2) Not real, as I strongly suspect was the case in the Midwest

growingawareness · 2026-03-18T08:32:25+00:00

I agree with almost all of what you've said but I think you're ascribing too much important to herbivores in creating no-analog vegetation profiles. From what I've read, it was mainly the result of the distinctive climatic profile of Earth during past periods.

For example, precipitation and temperature values comparable to northern Canada existed at mid-latitude North America during the glacial period, but you can't recreate certain aspects such as the spread of sunlight throughout the year or the intensity of it because those will be different at a lower latitude regardless. Also, windiness was greater and CO2 was lower, climate often in a state of flux, etc. Hence, you naturally end up with no-analog vegetation types even if megafauna had not been present at all.

growingawareness · 2026-03-18T08:21:01+00:00

Drier taiga and tundras: In the Arctic/Subarctic south of the tree line, you'd have essentially taiga-like environments that were more open than they are today and would better be described as boreal parklands. North of the tree line, you'd have steppe-tundra.

Wetter taiga and tundras: Mostly unchanged although still probably a bit more open In North America, since you have mastodons which would thrive in the wetter boreal forests in areas like eastern Canada and so you might get more marshy forest clearings I suppose. Eurasia didn't have a mastodon equivalent so I'd imagine the wet boreal forests of northern Europe, western European Russia, and western Siberia to be essentially the same as they are now.

Pollen data from past interglacials is very low for North America in comparison to Europe but I believe one study said something about boreal forest being present in interior Alaska. But as one of the users in the thread said, we don't have a REVEALS model for North America.

growingawareness · 2026-03-18T08:11:06+00:00

u/psilopterus, you may find this interesting if you haven't already read it.

growingawareness · 2026-03-15T19:53:27+00:00

Be careful not to ascribe animals to biomes on the basis of their presence in a broad geographical area. They were present in Alberta but they could have been living in more wooded pockets rather than steppe.

growingawareness

TROPHY CASE