Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

Homo sapiens
?
Guilty as Charged
Some scholars try to exonerate our species, placing the blame on the vagaries of
the climate (the usual scapegoat in such cases). Yet it is hard to believe that 
Homo
sapiens
was completely innocent. There are three pieces of evidence that weaken
the climate alibi, and implicate our ancestors in the extinction of the Australian
megafauna.
Firstly, even though Australia’s climate changed some 45,000 years ago, it
wasn’t a very remarkable upheaval. It’s hard to see how the new weather patterns
alone could have caused such a massive extinction. It’s common today to explain
anything and everything as the result of climate change, but the truth is that
earth’s climate never rests. It is in constant ux. Every event in history occurred
against the background of some climate change.
In particular, our planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and
warming. During the last million years, there has been an ice age on average
every 100,000 years. The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago. Not
unusually severe for an ice age, it had twin peaks, the rst about 70,000 years ago
and the second at about 20,000 years ago. The giant diprotodon appeared in
Australia more than 1.5 million years ago and successfully weathered at least ten
previous ice ages. It also survived the rst peak of the last ice age, around 70,000
years ago. Why, then, did it disappear 45,000 years ago? Of course, if diprotodons
had been the only large animal to disappear at this time, it might have been just a
uke. But more than 90 per cent of Australia’s megafauna disappeared along with
the diprotodon. The evidence is circumstantial, but it’s hard to imagine that
Sapiens, just by coincidence, arrived in Australia at the precise point that all these
animals were dropping dead of the chills.
3
Secondly, when climate change causes mass extinctions, sea creatures are
usually hit as hard as land dwellers. Yet there is no evidence of any signi cant
disappearance of oceanic fauna 45,000 years ago. Human involvement can easily
explain why the wave of extinction obliterated the terrestrial megafauna of
Australia while sparing that of the nearby oceans. Despite its burgeoning

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navigational abilities, 
Homo sapiens
was still overwhelmingly a terrestrial menace.
Thirdly, mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred
again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part
of the Outer World. In these cases Sapiens guilt is irrefutable. For example, the
megafauna of New Zealand – which had weathered the alleged ‘climate change’ of
c
.45,000 years ago without a scratch – su ered devastating blows immediately
after the rst humans set foot on the islands. The Maoris, New Zealand’s rst
Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800 years ago. Within a couple of
centuries, the majority of the local megafauna was extinct, along with 60 per cent
of all bird species.
A similar fate befell the mammoth population of Wrangel Island in the Arctic
Ocean (200 kilometres north of the Siberian coast). Mammoths had ourished for
millions of years over most of the northern hemisphere, but as 
Homo sapiens
spread – rst over Eurasia and then over North America – the mammoths
retreated. By 10,000 years ago there was not a single mammoth to be found in the
world, except on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel. The
mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then
suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the rst humans reached
the island.
Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the
bene t of the doubt. But the historical record makes