"Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 5 - People Of The Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Neal Kathleen)

and caused increases in precipitation. July probably felt like March.
Cooler temperatures decreased the amount of summer evaporation and
significantly affected the current desert regions of central and
southern California, Arizona and Nevada. Tremendous rains created and
sustained over a hundred pluvial lakes that covered the San Joaquin
Valley, the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin regions," turning them
into marshlands.

Human hunters entered California during this period and found an Ice
Age landscape populated by camels, imperial mammoths, dire wolves,
horses, giant sloths and saber-toothed cats, among other now extinct
animals. The California lion, the largest cat on record, was
approximately twenty-five percent larger than the modern African lion.
The most terrifying predator of all was the giant short-faced bear, the
biggest carnivore to ever inhabit North America; it weighed more than a
ton and had long legs designed for great speed and agility.

The question that has plagued scientists for generations is whether the
mammoths, mastodons and other "megafauna" were killed off by human
hunters or succumbed to the dramatic environmental changes that altered
the face of the continent.

We know from paleontological discoveries that before humans arrived,
the late-glacial megafauna populations were declining and struggling
for survival. The body size and stature of mammoths decreased,
probably in response to the capricious weather, which resulted in
habitat deterioration. We have a modern analogy to this in several
species of caribou in Canada. In order to conserve energy during
periods of cold and scarce grazing resources, the basal metabolic rates
of these caribou drop by about twenty-five percent and the animals
undergo a period-of no body growth. But we also know that megafauna
populations had survived at least four
xiv Foreword earlier periods of equally severe environmental stress
during the Pleistocene.

So why did they disappear ten to twelve thousand years ago--at exactly
the time when human hunters were spreading rapidly throughout the
Americas?

The extinctions could have been the consequence of the environmental
changes at the close of the Pleistocene. We cannot rule out the
possibility that for some unknown reason, the megafauna simply could
not counter these changes as they had countered similar changes in the
past. There may have been climatic stresses that we do not, at
present, understand. But the fact remains that they should have been
able to survive.

We do know for certain that humans hunted these massive animals and
killed them with extraordinary skill. We find archaeological sites
containing dart points embedded in the bones of mammoths and surrounded