On Mon, 11 Jun 2001 12:34:15 -0700, Wally Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>My original comments were not "just" regarding
>mammoths and other very large game. ..
> They hunted rhinos, and camels, and other
>beasts ... Not just mammoths. All
>are gone now because of climate changes that destroyed
>their food supplies ...

Mammoth, whooly rhino, camels and other beasts lived there, which
disappeared now.
I too tend to see the climatic change as the real reason.

Ray thinks that hunting of man and dogs was the reason.
But no predator can hunt it's prey to extinction.
The prey will become too seldom.
And I haven't jet seen an elephant in fear of a barking dog.
The elephants seem nicely undisturbed by the huntergathering population of
africa, like the !Kung. I think the !Kung are not mad enough to fight with
elephants instead of harvesting a few nuts.

>- plus a great inland sea that
>covered much of southern Idaho and northern Utah

You mean Lake Agassiz? That Lake was really big - influencing the climate
for shure ( http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/Agassiz/agassiz_facts.html ).
A similar lake possibly existed in Sibiria too (
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/lake.html ).

>> Of course such habitats are slow in regrowth of
>> vegetation, and any
>> influences, like with fire, can rapidly change the
>> scene.
>
>That's merely an assumption on your part. In my area
>*huge* forest fires occur with regularity - many of
>them too large for human intervention to stop them.
>They have to "burn themselves out". Surprisingly, most
>of these areas become life sustaining again in mere
>decades.

You speak of forests, boreal forests, do you?
This kind of vegetation is very rich of biomass bound in the trees and the
ground. If the trees burn down, the elements of the biomass are still
present there in form of the ashes. Which enables the big growth in the
follow-up.

If you've once seen reports from the northern ecosystem of Alasca.. I  have
noticed that even small influences have a very big impact there.
The growth is slow and the biomass is low.
I think the ecosystem of the glaciated times will have been more like that
of Alasca.
If humans burned down the last areas of steppe-grass which the megafauna
used to live on it could be a big contribution to their extinction.
Could be - that's of course conjecture.

I just can't believe that some humans with dogs running after the mammoths
all over the american plains could have had more than a small contribution
to their extinction.
More profited from their natural death (short but good  text about mammoth
extinction at: http://www.nrm.se/virtexhi/mammsaga/dismamm.html.en ).

Amadeus