Where is the evidence? animals and plants can be preserved in ice for thousands of years, enough time for gradual climate change to be responsable. It simply got colder and colder over many years in the said areas, and the ones that were found dead were the older or younger ones, without the strength to migrate, and they simple died out during a particularly cold winter. Not all plants die in cold like we think, if the change takes place over many years, they can adapt. I know of a cheeseplant that grew very well in the UK's climate all year round.
A change of just one degree every so often could have been responsable for this.
We can today prove that 'mass die offs' happen all the time in nature, sometimes with little explanation, but scientists always manage to work it out. A virus, pathogen or fungus moving among these animals could very easilly have killed them off before a winter arrived in an already cooling area, leaving them vaunrable to weakness, and inability to migrate with the heards.
Human hunters also paid the biggest part in the decline of the mammoth. Primative humans hunted them for their meat, skin and tusks, not out of greed like what would happen today, but out of need. However, it was humans that caused the extinction of what was one of the most amazing and adaptable animals ever to walk the Earth.
We are driving other species towards eventual extinction even now, tigers, leopards, panthers, jaguars, gorillas, all kinds of beautiful animals are facing extinction because of humans destroying habitats and hunting them for sport.
If we don't stop and ask ourselves, do we REALLY need to cut this forest down, and do we REALLY need this fur or this ivory, before we have a repeat incedent of the mammoths on our hands, only spanning more than one species.
miki (guest) 23 Dec 2009 17:32
