2/03/2025

Headline, February 04 2025/ ''' EARLY -[ N AMERICA'S ]- EARTH '''


''' EARLY 

-[ N AMERICA'S ]-

 EARTH '''




PREHISTORIC FOOD STAPLE : MAMMOTH STEAKS. ' Researchers think bones of ancient humans point to a reason for extinctions.

FOR millions of years, North America was home to a zoo of giants : mammoths and mastodons, camels and dire wolves, sloth the size of elephants and beavers as big bears. And then, at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch about 12,000 years ago, most of them vanished.

Scientists have argued for decades about the cause of their extinction. Now, a study analyzing the ancient bones of a young child who lived in Montana suggests that the early Americans hunted mammoths and other giant mammals to oblivion.

'' I was surprised to see things fit so nicely,'' said Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and an author of the new study, which was published in the journal Science Advances.

For decades, most paleontologists blamed the climate for the disappearance of North America's megafauna. Their extinction coincided with the end of the last ice age, a time when the planet quickly warmed and glaciers retreated northward. The large mammals appeared unable to adapt.

But in the 1960s, the American geoscientist Paul Martin challenged that hypothesis. The last ice age was part of a cycle of warming and cooling that had lasted for millions of years. Why had the megafauna survived earlier periods of warming, but not this one?

Martin believed that the difference was people. At the time, researchers were discovering some crucial clues about how humans had spread from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge into North America.

They discovered that the oldest known archaeological remains in North America - stone spearheads known as Clovis points - dated to the end of the ice age, suggesting that their arrival coincided with the extinctions.

Martin argued that people had made their way into North America as the glaciers receded and they began hunting the continent's big game. The large mammals had never encountered our species before, leaving them with few defenses.

His '' overkill hypothesis '' gained traction over the years. Some researchers have even argued that the same wave of people who hunted down the giant mammals in North America caused a similar wave of extinction when it got to South America.

But some scientists were skeptical. Critics argued that there was little clear cut evidence from archaeological sites of human killing and eating giant mammals. Instead, they said early Americans ate small mammals, fish and plants. Some claimed that Clovis points weren't even strong enough to pierce a mammoth's hide.

Dr. Potter and his colleagues recently tackled the debate from a new direction: by investigating the diet of the Clovis people from the chemical composition of their bones.

The researchers took advantage of the fact that the atoms of each element in our bodies are not all identical. A tiny fraction of our carbon atoms, for example, carry an extra subatomic particle making them a little heavier than the common form.

The heavy and light forms of carbon - known as carbon isotopes - behave differently in chemical reactions that take place inside of plants. The same is true for nitrogen. As a result, plants end up with distinctive isotopic signatures.

Animals that eat plants end up with a signature of their own, as do the predators that eat them.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on prehistoric food staple and the world, continues. !WOW! thanks Carl Zimmer.

With most respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society - for every subject in the world - and then Mankind, Students, Professors and Teachers.

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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