william wrote:
> Ron Hoggan wrote:
>>
>>
>> About the time that grain agriculture was getting started in the Fertile
>> Crescent, most of the large mammals that had been roaming through Europe
>> were endangered or newly extinct. There is good evidence to suggest that
>> pre-agricultural humans hunted them to extinction. Pre-agricultural 
>> humans
>> had larger brains than we do, and they probably needed them to be 
>> able to
>> kill the enormous herbivores of their time.  The assumption that 
>> humans are
>> merely stupid brutes may have some merit. I think it is pretty stupid to
>> destroy your own food supply --- and we haven't stopped doing that.
>> (desertification, genetic modification, feed lots, feeding meat to cows,
>> etc., etc.) Maybe we are still stupid brutes? :-)
>>
>>   
> That's from the steady state theory, where nothing other than man 
> could have caused extinction.
> There is also abundant evidence that Velikovsky's cataclysmic theory 
> is correct, supported by the wooly mammoths found in Siberia, the 
> bones and ivory found on islands north of there, etc.
> So the neolithic might have been a desperate and intelligent response 
> to a sudden scarcity of previously plentiful game.
>
> William
>
>
Interesting thoughts.  It's clear that something happened about 10,000 
BC when ocean water levels went up 400 feet and I believe the 
Mediterranean sea filled up as well.  In about 5500 BC the Mediterranean 
broke through to the Black Sea flooding that and sending the people that 
lived in those valleys off in all directions.  It's estimated it took 
about a year to fill so plenty of time to pack a few thing get the heck 
out of dodge.  The evidence of this migration is found in the root words 
of indo European languages including  family terms and they carried with 
them agriculture migrating as far as India.  Another event seems to have 
taken place sometime before 3000 BC as evidenced by ice core samples, 
the beginning of civilizations arising after this 3000+BC event in what 
is now Iraq, Egypt, and Pakistan - all in areas fairly far in from major 
oceans with plenty of water to grow crops and avoid ocean events (meteor 
strikes).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans

Steve