Word: extinctionism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Every day Carel Van Schaik heard the chain saws as gangs of illegal loggers cut through the trees across the river from his orangutans' forest habitat. And every day the fighting between Acehnese rebels and the army moved closer; mutilated bodies sometimes were found dumped in these very forests. Indonesia...
Why? Some scientists blame climate change; others finger a mega-outbreak of disease. Still others subscribe to what Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery refers to as the "black-hole theory of extinction." In this case, as Flannery wryly explains in his just published ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier...
Or then again, it could have been the other way around, argues MacPhee, who believes disease offers a more credible instrument of decline. He suspects that some disease-causing microbe--one to which New World organisms lacked resistance--tagged along with the Stone Age hunters who first ventured into the...
The second study, which examined the disappearance of large animals in Australia, sought to specify the time frame of the extinction rather than the cause. According to the study, every Australian land mammal, reptile and bird heavier than 100 kg and most of those weighing 45 to 100 kg died...
The studies have their detractors. Some scientists cite the lack of archeological evidence as one of many problems with Alroy's study, and Ayliffe says it is unlikely that hunting was the sole cause of the Australian extinction. She suggests that the human use of fire, combined with hunting, may...