Amadeus Schmidt wrote:

> So, just kill annother one and let the rest 40 pounds animal rot away.
> Today, aboriginals are about 170,000 persons. Estimations on pre-occupation
> population go up to 1-2 millions.
> If everyone of only 170,000 killed one kangaroo every day thats
>  62,050,000 kangaroos per year.

I mean this in sincerity and this is not an attact ot our indegenous
people, but research indictates that _some_ aborignal tribes were not
particularly gentle on their environament - both plant and animal.

These estimations are very suspect. It is hard to extrapolate the data
based on current numbers and  their growth/decline rate, but it should
be pointed out that Australia is inhabitible in a great majority of
areas and apart from the eastern side of the country the environment
would not lend itself to large populations pre-agriculture


> How long does a kangaroo live? How fast do they reproduce?

Don't know about lifespane but kangaroos have special reproduction
features not common in other animals - the female almost always has a
baby (in pouch, and will always have a fertilised embryo that does not
begin to age/grow until such time as the pouch is empty. Interestingly,
if the baby (the name for a baby kangaroo is a joey BTW) dies from
whatever reason, the foetus/embryo will start to develop. They are being
studied with respect to this ability by scientists looking at life
extentsion in humans. The things is, and above is part of the reason,
that  they are plentiful, and were no doubt more plentiful before it was
colonised. The live in groups and arent hard to hunt. There is evidence
to suggest that they were eaten, and eaten with a lot of the body
discarded (the edible part

>
> Where are those kangaroo killing fields?

are you kidding?  bones are covered easily with new topsoil, not to
mention carnivorous/omnivourous animals which would no doubt eat the
remains. You don't have to walk far in the bush (Australian equivalent
of a forest - a dry one at that - ) to find animal carcasses. Don't
forget too, that aboriginal people were predominantly nomadic - so its
not like they just had one big area to kill and leave carcasses - thy
are scattered everywhere. Also, apart from the dingo, there arent a lot
of big predators hree. the dingo was believed to be brought here by
aborigines, and it would obviously eat them, but apart from this there
isn't much threat to a kangaroo in terms of being hunted - perhaps by
crocodile, but they arent  found everywhere on the continent . This also
perhaps why we have so many unique species over here. The lack of
numerous types of powerful predator may also be responsible for the
development of the native species. Most of the animals here would not
exist at all in an environment with significant numbers of predators.

John McKenzie