"snip" : "But the proposal's supporters say it could help save some species (lions/elephants)from extinction in Africa, where protection is spotty and habitats are vanishing."

US habitats are better than Africa's???

This proposed introduction of species doesn't sound like a good idea. There already are such places called zoos, which is what a wildlife conservation district would be. Animals that have thrived in one environment may not fair well at all in a place other than one which offers their preferred native food sources. I guess they could plant African plants in the proposed compounds to help the imported animals thrive. Ted Turner should consider buying large tracts of land in Africa to set aside for conservation of African wildlife.

This quote is strange:

"They say the relocated animals could also restore the biodiversity in North America to a condition closer to what it was before humans overran the landscape more than 10,000 years ago."

I didn't think the NA landscape was overran by humans until less than five hundred years ago.

I caught part of a ?PBS? interview with the graduate student pursuing this project. His thesis is that paleoindians killed off some kinds of large wildlife and altered habitats enough to bring on the demise of others. He did give some credit to changing climate and associated changes in vegetation cover.

I have to ask why the antelope, elk, bison and various deer populations didn't expire under hunting pressure and environmental changes?

Just what we need maurauding elephants, hyena packs chasing down our pets, and lions and tigers, oh my!

I find it hard to accept that Native Americans could single-handedly wipe out megafauna. Although that was the view years ago, I'd thought that theory had been abandoned by archeologists. I'd have to weight changing environments over humans.

Archeological evidence documents humans in North America well before 15,000 years BP, but mostly in relatively low numbers even in the east until 1200-1000 years ago when agriculture and big villages came into being. They certainly impacted certain areas with hunting, agriculture, and burning, but I don't know that I'd characterize it as overrunning the continent.

The question of setting aside parts of the US for large wildlife has come up before. If that were ever done, I think I'd be more interested in seeing Holocene environments - wild grassland, buffalo, antelope, et al brought back. As a last ditch effort, I'd want to see some of these African animals conserved in refuges in the US, but otherwise, I'm with you Althea, I'd rather see them saved in Africa.

One would hope that the theory would have been abandoned by all fields, not just archeologists. It continues to be revived by those acting as apologists for environmental degradation.

Wake up and smell the dung,, The African Ibis was introduced the the desert southwest 10 years ago, to roam with the antelope... I would have never believed it if I hadn't com face to face with one on a hiking trip in the Chirichuachua mtn's,, big gnarley, curly horns, ugly as sin,,, I had to home to look it up,, They are already here, cochise

Yeah, and we have wild eastern turkeys here in California too. And wild burros and wild horses and...

Somehow, I bet a fair number of Africans have more important things to worry about than the preservation of natural habitat and wild animal species. Like... eating.

Back in my youth, I had a job working in the animal nursery at Lion Country Safari. Providing suitable habitat and feeding the animals we had in the park was a very expensive undertaking. That was the best, most interesting, and most fun job I ever had, albeit the lowest-paying.
Mrs H

Some of our habitats are better because we can control them. Poachers hunting for sex drive enhancers are not a big problem here.

Returning the plains is a nice idea but they will never return until we get rid of the fences and highways between Central Texas and the Dakotas. The grazing animals need room to roam all year long with fresh grass the entire route.

Zoos. Unless they have a breeding program, they don't have enough biodiversity to sustain a breed of animal. A ranch with hundreds of square miles to offer can handle enough of a bio sample to sustain a breed. We have ranches like that here in Texas. The animals just live here. They are not hunted at all. The income from the land has usually shifted from cropland or cattle pasture to petro dollars. Animals can roam among the pumps and pipelines without much danger. There have already been several, if not many, cases where animals have been transplanted back to their native habitat when the conditions seemed appropriate (like a war ended or real teeth in the local (African) anti-poaching laws).

"One would hope that the theory would have been abandoned by all fields, not just archeologists. It continues to be revived by those acting as apologists for environmental degradation."

It continues to be put forth for the simple reason that there is no better explanation for the disappearance of North American megafauna. The introduction of a new predator with a proven ability to cause the extinction of a wide variety of prey animals by hunting is a major event that can explain the extinction of megafauna, and there are no other similar events in the time period during which the North American megafauna went extinct. There are definitely a lot of people who really don't want to believe that Native Americans wiped out the megafauna, but there's no alternative explanation.

The idea that introducing megafauna from Africa would "restore" the pre-human ecosystem is absurd, though. Yes, there were pachyderms in the US--but there's no reason to think African elephants are ecologically equivalent to the native North American pachyderms, and, in fact, many of our worst invasive species are more closely related to the native species than the African elephant is to the extinct native pachyderms (e.g., Rosa multiflora & Lythrum salicaria in the eastern US, Rana catesbiana in the southwest US). And even if we knew that the African megafauna acted exactly the same as their extinct native counterparts, we still wouldn't know if introducing them in the US would make current ecosystems more or less similar to the pre-human condition, or if doing so would be better or worse for the currently present flora, fauna, & ecology.

Patrick Alexander

Patrick, climate change is the current, more sound explanation of the extinction of megafauna. Paul Martin's theory of overhunting is based on faulty reasoning and bad science. This link is to an article for more info on current research into climate change in the late Pleistocine era. I'm sure there are better articles or papers out there than this. It happened to be one of the first hits on my google search for ["Paul Martin" climate criticism megafauna extinction].

Here is a link that might be useful: sciencedaily

"Patrick, climate change is the current, more sound explanation of the extinction of megafauna."

Climate change doesn't make much sense as an explanation, though. Yes, we're currently in an interglacial period, & there was a great deal of change in climate & vegetation associated with the shift from the last glacial period to the current interglacial. The thing is--there wasn't just one glacial period that ended, there was a series of alternating glacial and interglacial periods that these specices had been living through just fine. All this had happened many times before without having resulted in mass extinction of megafauna. So why was there megafaunal extinction this time and not the others? Well, the most obvious difference is that this time there was a new predator on the scene. Climate change probably played a part, but climate change alone can't explain why this glacial-->interglacial transition resulted in mass megafaunal extinction when the previous ones hadn't.

Patrick Alexander

There are problems with both theories of extinction. True, the climate model does not account for previous interglacials during which megafauna existed, but the hunting theory doesn't account for the persistence of other fauna like elk, moose, sheep, and bison which were also game for Clovis people. One researcher in defending the climate model has noted that these survivors are omnivores and ruminants with multi-chambered stomachs that chew their food several times. The megafauna that died out were hind-gut ferminters (horses, mammoths, sloths) and carnivores that preyed on them suggesting an evolutionary advantage to animals that could forage efficiently in a stressed environment.

Here is a link that might be useful: Extinct Megafauna

That is an excellent piece of the puzzle KT. It fits with the likely consequences of shifts in vegetation patterns due to warming at the end of the Pleistocene period and inability to adapt to shrinking habitat.

Researchers in Australia recently revisited Darling Downs. This is what they found:

"By systematically analysing a 10 metre deep section of creek bed, the team uncovered 44 species, ranging from land snails, frogs, lizards and small mammals to giant wombats and kangaroos including many species previously unknown to have occurred in the Darling Downs fossil record.

The results suggest that the extinction of Darling Downs megafauna was caused by a massive shift in climate rather than by the arrival of humans who over hunted animals or destroyed habitats by burning the landscape.

The findings, which were unearthed with the help of amateur fossil hunter, Ian Sobbe, are of particular significance because the Darling Downs fossil deposits are among the youngest Australian megafauna deposits - laid down on the cusp of the extinction event.

[snip]

The Darling Downs contain some of the most extensive and significant Pleistocene megafauna deposits in Australia but because it's been excavated since the 1840s it was assumed that the palaeoenvironment record was well established.

Closer examination revealed a bias in sample collection in favour of larger animals and there had been few attempts to document ecological and sediment data."

See link for full text.

The N.A. overkill hypothesis doesn't account for the birds lost at the same percentage of the megafauna. Who knows what else that may have been overlooked.

Even more suspect is the fact that Martin's theory is based on the land bridge hypothesis which isn't supported by any evidence, yet has become gospel.

Here is a link that might be useful: alert

All my Axis live in Texas.Texas is the exotic animal capital of the word. Introduced years ago on large ranches exotics were brought in for hunting purposes.While the intent was to keep them on these ranches it didn't work.One upside to this practice is in some cases there are more of one species then there are remaining in Africa. I recall one of the rhinos being one of those animals. The down side is the loss of food and range for our native animals.We've been doing this non native introduction sense the coming of the white man. And its failed.Starlings,sparrows,pigeons have starved off many of our native birds.The introduction of non native animals created the same problems. To try and control the problem you can buy a 40 dollar non native hunting stamp.The rules are simple. You can hunt any non native animal day or night with anything from a knife to a F15.And yet it has failed to slow down the population growth of these animals.