Last of the giants: What killed off Madagascar’s megafauna a thousand years ago?:
The first job is to understand exactly when the megafauna died out.
Radiocarbon dating of over 400 recent fossils demonstrates that animals under 22 pounds lived on Madagascar throughout the last 10,000 years. For animals over 22 pounds, there are abundant fossils up to 1,000 years ago, but relatively few since. The biggest decline in number of large animals occurred rapidly between A.D. 700 and 1000 – practically instantaneous given the long history of their existence on the island.
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According to new dates on fossil bones with cut marks on them, humans arrived on Madagascar 10,500 years ago, much earlier than previously believed. But whoever these early people were, there’s no genetic evidence of them left on the island. New analysis of the human genetic diversity in modern Madagascar suggests the current population derives primarily from two waves of migration: first from Indonesia 3,000 to 2,000 years ago, and later from mainland Africa 1,500 years ago.
So it seems that people lived alongside the megafauna for thousands of years. How did the humans interact with the large animals?
Our new study found dozens of fossils with butchery marks. Cut and chop marks provide compelling evidence as to which species people were hunting and eating. Evidence of butchery of animals that are now extinct continues right up to the time of the megafaunal crash. Some people on Madagascar hunted and ate the megafauna for millennia without a population crash.
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The abrupt land use change might hold some clues. The transition from a forest-dominated ecosystem to a grassland-dominated ecosystem appears to be widespread….
This research about Madagascar is important. If it turns out correct, I think it gives us deep insights about the expansion of modern humans outside of Africa ~50,000 years ago, and why their arrival resulted in the extinction of so many other human lineages. A generation ago we might have posited that some massive bio-behavioral change is what triggered this, but I am coming closer to the idea that cultural changes are punctuated enough that that may actually explain things. The culture changes first, then genes follow the culture.
Perhaps one might posit a model with massive turnovers in the hominin lineage due to this cultural dynamic occurs periodically, as if it’s a Poisson process.