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Humans hunted Earth’s biggest animals to extinction for 1.5 million years

"The extinction of large animals was caused by humans – who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting"

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By Georgia Lambert via SWNS

Humans have hunted the biggest animals on Earth to extinction for the last 1.5 million years but by doing so they led us to innovate and turn to farming, new research revealed.

Our ancestors were eventually only left with animals the size of deer which they had invented bows and arrows to hunt and so turned to domesticating animals and farming.

A ground-breaking study led by researchers from Tel Aviv University has unearthed how early humans hunted their prey over the last 1.5 million years.

via GIPHY

The researchers claimed that at any given time, early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, to give their families hearty meals from just one animal instead of making the effort to kill multiple smaller animals.

By choosing to hunt this way, early humans fell into a routine of repeatedly overhunting large animals until they ceased to exist from the archaeological record.

Once extinct, they moved to the next in size and improved their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge.

The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs.

This might also explain why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant region, Eastern Mediterranean in Western Asia, at that time.

The study was conducted by Professor Ran Barkai and Dr. Miki Ben-Dor from the Jacob M Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures.

Professor Barkai and Dr. Ben-Dor were joined by a team of researchers who set out to conduct what became an unprecedented analysis of data on animal bones, which were discovered at dozens of prehistoric sites in and around Israel.

The findings from these sites suggested that there was a decline in the size of game hunted by humans as their main food source - from giant elephants 1-1.5 million years ago, to gazelles 10,000 years ago.

According to the researchers, these findings paint an illuminating picture of the interaction between humans and the animals around them over the last 1.5 million years.

Professor Barkai set out to find answers to two questions that had stumped prehistorians worldwide.

The first was exploring what caused the mass extinction of large animals over the past hundreds of thousands of years. Was it overhunting by humans or the recurring climate changes?

The second looked at what the driving forces behind the "great changes in humankind" were, throughout our evolution.

In light of these questions, Professor Barkai said: "In light of previous studies, our team proposed an original hypothesis that links the two questions: We think that large animals went extinct due to overhunting by humans and that the change in diet and the need to hunt progressively smaller animals may have propelled the changes in humankind.

"In this study, we tested our hypotheses in light of data from excavations in the Southern Levant covering several human species over a period of 1.5 million years."

Jacob Dembitzer, a research student at the university, added: "We considered the Southern Levant (Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Southwest Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) to be an 'archaeological laboratory' due to the density and continuity of prehistoric findings covering such a long period of time over a relatively small area - a unique database unavailable anywhere else in the world.

"Excavations, which began 150 years ago, have produced evidence for the presence of humans, beginning with Homo erectus who arrived 1.5 million years ago, through the Neandertals who lived here from an unknown time until they disappeared about 45,000 years ago, to modern humans (namely, ourselves) who came from Africa in several waves, starting around 180,000 years ago."

The team collected gathered all the data they could find on the collection of animal bones found at prehistoric sites in the Southern Levant and mostly in Israel.

These excavations, which had been conducted from 1932 to today, provided the researchers with a unique sequence of findings from different types of humans over a period spanning 1.5 million years.

Some of the excavation sites had several layers of rock, which sometimes separated the animals by thousands of years.

With that in mind, the study covered a total of 133 rock layers from 58 prehistoric sites, in which thousands of bones belonging to 83 different animal species had been identified.

Based on these remains, the team painstakingly calculated the average weight and size of the animals in each layer at every site.

Professor Shai Meiri from the School of Zoology said: "Our study tracked changes at a much higher resolution over a considerably longer period of time compared to previous research.

"The results were illuminating: we found a continual, and very significant, decline in the size of animals hunted by humans over 1.5 million years."

For example, a third of the bones left behind by Homo erectus at sites dated to about a million years ago belonged to elephants that weighed up to 13 tons (more than twice the weight of the modern African elephant) and provided humans with 90 percent of their food.

"The mean weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was three tons, and elephant bones were found at nearly all sites up to 500,000 years ago."

The Professor who also teaches at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History explained the findings further and said: "Starting about 400,000 years ago, the humans who lived in our region - early ancestors of the Neandertals and Homo sapiens, appear to have hunted mainly deer, along with some larger animals weighing almost a ton, such as wild cattle and horses.

"Finally, in sites inhabited by modern humans, from about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70 percent of the bones belong to gazelles – an animal that weighs no more than 20-30 kg. Other remains found at these later sites came mostly from fallow deer (about 20 percent), as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles."

Mr. Dembitzer explained how they uncovered what caused the disappearance of large animals.

He said: "A widely accepted theory attributes the extinction of large species to climate changes through the ages.

"To test this, we collected climatic and environmental data for the entire period, covering more than a dozen cycles of glacial and interglacial periods.

"This data included temperatures based on levels of the oxygen 18 isotope and rainfall and vegetation evidenced by values of carbon 13 from the local Soreq Cave.

"A range of statistical analyses correlating between animal size and climate, precipitation, and environment, revealed that climate, and climate change, had little, if any, impact on animal extinction.”

Dr Ben-Dor said: "Our findings enable us to propose a fascinating hypothesis on the development of humankind: humans always preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, until these became very rare or extinct, forcing the prehistoric hunters to seek the next in size.

"As a result, to obtain the same amount of food, every human species appearing in the Southern Levant was compelled to hunt smaller animals than its predecessor, and consequently had to develop more advanced and effective technologies.

"Thus, for example, while spears were sufficient for Homo erectus to kill elephants at close range, modern humans developed the bow and arrow to kill fast-running gazelles from a distance."

Professor Barkai ended by explaining why their study was so important.

He said: "We believe that our model is relevant to human cultures everywhere. Moreover, for the first time, we argue that the driving force behind the constant improvement in human technology is the continual decline in the size of game.

"Ultimately, it may well be that 10,000 years ago in the Southern Levant, animals became too small or too rare to provide humans with sufficient food, and this could be related to the advent of agriculture.

"In addition, we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans – who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting.

"We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created – from the bow and arrow to the agricultural revolution.

"The environment, however, always paid a devastating price."

The study's findings were published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

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