Let's Go Mammoth Hunting

[C-Mag]

Beast Master build. Going to have to have a hell of a saving throw for that one.

Sounds like a gaming thing.


Bison Latifrons, scarry huh.

[Okeefenokee]

Animal behavior, including your own, is mostly genetic.

So, your saying it's not my fault or my parents fault I'm an asshole. God just decided, ya know what we the world needs is a darkly disturbed asshole that is 6'2 and well built.

Mostly. You still have an intellect, so you are responsible for when your genetic behavior breaks moral bounds. For example, women's monkey-branching, destroying their families due to hypergamy, etc., all comes from their evolutionary psychology, but it doesn't mean they lack responsibility for their actions.

Quite a lot of our behavior is actually genetic, including some of the subtle behaviors that give rise to specific civilizations, such as the high-trust civilizations of European peoples, or the high-conformity civilizations of East Asians.

Epigenetics are a part of genetics, and have a lot of control over an individual, and those epigenetic traits are generally only a couple of generations old. That's why I'm wondering about the plausibility of firing up a species with no ancestors.

[Otern]

I'm a bit divided on the whole "outdated methods of hunting" thing.

On one hand, animals should be hunted in the most humane way possible, and a rifle will always be more precise, and easier to pick the right caliber for the right animal.

But on the other hand, it's also great to keep old traditions alive, if only to understand how the prehistoric people lived their lives. And hunting with bow and arrows, or atlatl, sounds pretty great. And if something is to be made illegal, there should be a good reason for it. Like any old outdated skill and craft, it's sad to see it disappear from humanity.

As for bringing back the mammoth. Hell yes. As long as they're not brought into an area where they'll come in conflict with humans. We brought back the muskox to Norway, even though they died out in Europe 9000 years ago. One farmer got killed by a muskox in the sixties, but after that, any muskox getting close to homes, get shot. Now the conflict is at least manageable. And as long as the intrusive muskoxes are taken out, I'm ok with them being reintroduced even though they got extinct naturally. We should open up for trophy hunting of them though. Just let some rich German pay a lot to take out a few from time to time.

They do stampede some tourists every other year though, but it's usually some silly continental urbanite trying to take a cool selfie or give them some biscuits or something.

[Montegriffo]

With the woolly mammoth I guess a lot depends on the reason for their extinction last time. If it was caused by lack of sustainable habitat then they may be doomed to the same result, if however their extinction was caused by over hunting then they may be able to survive given proper protection. You could just end up with ivory poachers moving from the African reserves to the frozen tundras. More needs to be done to control the ivory trade and demand in places like China for this to be more than a few examples to draw crowds in zoos around the world.

[Speaker to Animals]

I doubt overhunting played much of a part. There weren't that many humans back then.

[Montegriffo]

I doubt overhunting played much of a part. There weren't that many humans back then.

From what I've seen on the subject it is still open to debate. Many of the frozen remains being found do show evidence of being killed by humans.
http://www.history.com/news/were-humans ... ly-mammoth

Human intervention has played a major role in many of the world’s more recent animal extinctions, but according to a new study, our Ice Age ancestors may have been responsible for the disappearance of prehistoric “megafauna” such as the wooly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger. By using innovative statistical analysis to trace migrations and extinction rates, a team of researchers has found that Earth’s ancient giant mammals tended to die out shortly after humans moved into their neighborhood.

For decades now, scientists have debated why prehistoric behemoths such as the wooly mammoth, the wooly rhino, the saber-toothed tiger and the giant armadillo all went extinct between 80,000 and 10,000 years ago. Climate change, species-wide disease outbreaks and even a massive asteroid impact have been put forward as possible causes of their disappearance, but new evidence places the majority of the blame on a single source: mankind.

“As far as we are concerned, this research is the nail in the coffin of this 50-year debate—humans were the dominant cause of the extinction of megafauna,” lead author Lewis J. Bartlett said in a University of Exeter press release. “What we don’t know is what it was about these early settlers that caused this demise. Were they killing them for food, was it early use of fire or were they driven out of their habitats? Our analysis doesn’t differentiate, but we can say that it was caused by human activity more than by climate change. It debunks the myth of early humans living in harmony with nature.”

http://www.livescience.com/46081-humans ... ction.html

The latest volley in a long-running debate over why woolly mammoths, giant sloths, mastodons and cave lions died out worldwide suggests that humans are to blame.

A new global look at the extinctions of large mammals over the past 130,000 years finds that the loss of species correlates more closely with the arrival of humans than with changes in climate, which some studies have cited as a possible culprit.

Nonetheless, the paper is unlikely to settle the debate over what really caused the Quaternary extinction, a die-off of large mammals worldwide at the end of the Pleistocene epoch about 12,000 years ago. It is, however, one of the first fine-grained, yet global, look at how and when species died."The evidence really strongly suggests that people were the defining factor," said study leader Chris Sandom, co-founder of the consulting firm Wild Business Ltd., who completed the work as a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark.

[Speaker to Animals]

I doubt overhunting played much of a part. There weren't that many humans back then.

From what I've seen on the subject it is still open to debate. Many of the frozen remains being found do show evidence of being killed by humans.
http://www.history.com/news/were-humans ... ly-mammoth

Human intervention has played a major role in many of the world’s more recent animal extinctions, but according to a new study, our Ice Age ancestors may have been responsible for the disappearance of prehistoric “megafauna” such as the wooly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger. By using innovative statistical analysis to trace migrations and extinction rates, a team of researchers has found that Earth’s ancient giant mammals tended to die out shortly after humans moved into their neighborhood.

For decades now, scientists have debated why prehistoric behemoths such as the wooly mammoth, the wooly rhino, the saber-toothed tiger and the giant armadillo all went extinct between 80,000 and 10,000 years ago. Climate change, species-wide disease outbreaks and even a massive asteroid impact have been put forward as possible causes of their disappearance, but new evidence places the majority of the blame on a single source: mankind.

“As far as we are concerned, this research is the nail in the coffin of this 50-year debate—humans were the dominant cause of the extinction of megafauna,” lead author Lewis J. Bartlett said in a University of Exeter press release. “What we don’t know is what it was about these early settlers that caused this demise. Were they killing them for food, was it early use of fire or were they driven out of their habitats? Our analysis doesn’t differentiate, but we can say that it was caused by human activity more than by climate change. It debunks the myth of early humans living in harmony with nature.”

http://www.livescience.com/46081-humans ... ction.html

The latest volley in a long-running debate over why woolly mammoths, giant sloths, mastodons and cave lions died out worldwide suggests that humans are to blame.

A new global look at the extinctions of large mammals over the past 130,000 years finds that the loss of species correlates more closely with the arrival of humans than with changes in climate, which some studies have cited as a possible culprit.

Nonetheless, the paper is unlikely to settle the debate over what really caused the Quaternary extinction, a die-off of large mammals worldwide at the end of the Pleistocene epoch about 12,000 years ago. It is, however, one of the first fine-grained, yet global, look at how and when species died."The evidence really strongly suggests that people were the defining factor," said study leader Chris Sandom, co-founder of the consulting firm Wild Business Ltd., who completed the work as a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark.

I personally doubt it because the mega-fauna extinction was global, occurred at the end of the ice age when the planet experienced extreme climate shift, and the human population itself hit a bottleneck as well.

That humans hunted mammoths is not really relevant. There simply were not enough humans to make a difference, in my opinion, especially in places like North America where mastodons also went extinct.

[Montegriffo]

The scientific evidence seems to contradict your personal opinion. Try reading the articles I posted, the research was global and extinctions coincided with the arrival of humans in most if not all cases including the Americas.

[Speaker to Animals]

The scientific evidence seems to contradict your personal opinion. Try reading the articles I posted, the research was global and extinctions coincided with the arrival of humans in most if not all cases including the Americas.

It's conflicting. I can post just as many sources, and yours were just pop science articles at that. Nobody knows exactly why the mega fauna extinction occurred.

[Montegriffo]

However, most recent and up to date research is concluding that humans did in fact have an impact in the extinction of mega fauna around the globe.
Provide some recent scientific evidence to support your theory before dismissing the possibility of human causes out of hand.