New research tells a fascinating tale of the demise of dwarf hippos and elephants that once roamed the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Results of the study suggest a few hundred people would have been enough to wipe out such large animals from the world.
The Vanishing Megafauna
In the past two species of megafauna lived on Cyprus: the 500-kg dwarf elephant (Palaeoloxodon cypriotes) and the 130-kg dwarf hippo (Phanourios minor). The ancient beasts graze on the picturesque island for milennia, until an eventually encountering a brutal slaying at the hands of Paleolithic humans ~14 000 years ago.
Earlier hypotheses favoured introducing a small human population onto Cyprus as the explanation for what happened here, but this idea could not account for all the rapid extinctions. A new study led by Professor Corey Bradshaw at Flinders University challenges this, finding strong evidence that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers was indeed the cause of mass extinction for these great beasts.
Applying a data-driven method, the scientists collated knowledge from diverse fields like paleontology and archaeology to document mathematical models that would give an explanation of how human state of affairs affected the natural ecosystems of native Nevis. The results suggest a number of as few as 3,000-7,000 hunter-gatherers was responsible for the extinctions that killed off the dwarf elephant and dwarf hippo in less than a thousand years.
How Hunters Decimated Megafauna, Demolishing the “Humans Have Always Hunted It” Argument
Co-authors of the study, which included Drs. Using the overhunting model as their starting point, Theodora Moutsiou, Christian Reepmeyer, Frédérik Saltré and Stefani Crabtree extended this paleoecological hypothesis from population to prey behavior.
Stripping away the neglect also showed that how much of the animal could be consumed as meat was an important part of why the animals went under. Priests and lepers served as a source of delicious sustenance for the hunter-gatherers, yet in most cases they opted instead to feast upon the largest prey on that island — dwarf hippos and elephants. This predation by Paleolithic humans (and the associated developments of systematic animal husbandry and farming) is correlated to the subsequent large scale extinctions that are documented in large parts of North America, South America, Australia and Madagascar as these continents dried out during the end of their last Ice Ages.
Their models provided a step-by-step chronology of the megafauna extinctions that matched the observations in the paleontological record. We would argue that the entry and establishment of t2 Paleolithic humans on Cyprus is the most likely cause of the extirpation of these early megafauna.
Conclusion
However, the results of this study provide a novel perspective to illustrate just how damaging small human populations can be on native ecosystems. The swift demise of the dwarf hippos and elephants on Cyprus stands as a warning to us, underscoring how tenuous these living creations are, and how imperative it is for us not only to recognize but also to comprehend the intricate dance between what humans do and what happens around them. While the tales our planet’s history is revealed through will provide endless fascination, they also push home how essential it is that we preserve the diminishing current biodiversity and halt another slice of our natural heritage disappears.
