Nice Comment

Comment by Stephen on Friday

Humans have been driving a global reduction in mammal size for thousands of years

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE—The dispersal of humans out of Africa coincided with a dramatic global reduction in the size of mammals, a new study* reveals. This “downsizing” trend may continue, suggest the authors, to the extent that, in just a couple hundred years, the largest terrestrial mammal left may be the domestic cow, weighing in at 900 kilograms (kg). Felisa A. Smith et al. sought to understand how the size of mammals has changed over time. They updated and created two datasets that capture the global distribution and body size of terrestrial mammals that lived between 66 million years ago through the present. The authors found a substantial bias in mammal extinction during the periods when humans were dispersing around the globe, whereby species that went extinct tended to be two to three times bigger than mammals that survived, a trend that was evident globally. Notably, prior to humans’ migration out of Africa 125,000 years ago, Africa was home to mammals of smaller size (with a mean body mass roughly half that of mammals found in Eurasia), which the authors suggest is reflective of the hominin-mammal interactions that had already been at play. Perhaps most striking is the reduction of mammals in the New World during the late Pleistocene, which coincided with humans’ adoption of long-range weapons. The authors report a greater than 10-fold drop in both mean and maximum body mass of mammals during this time; for example, mean mass of terrestrial mammals in North America fell from 98.0 to 7.6 kg. If current trends continue, the mean body mass of mammals in North America will drop from 7.7 to 4.9 kg in a few hundred years, the authors say. As mammals play a critical role in shaping ecosystems, the downsizing trend will have a cascading impact on other organisms.

https://popular-archaeology.com/article/humans-have-been-driving-a-...

Comment by Mrs.B on Friday

Yeah, evolution is an always ongoing thing.

Comment by Doone on Friday

Shrinking Megafauna: hominins have hunted largest mammals to extinction since late Pleistocene. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6386/310 … #anthropocene #anthroecology

Comment by Doone on Thursday

More

Humans Are Still Evolving Today, And Scientists Have Just Found A Whole Host Of New Adaptions http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/humans-are-still-evolving-today-we-can-see-it-written-in-our-genes/ …

Comment by Stephen on April 15, 2018 at 4:26pm

Just one more of those gaps that god is supposed to be living in getting smaller and smaller.

Comment by Doone on April 15, 2018 at 3:53pm

We are living in a golden age of new information about our history and the universe

 John Rowan Retweeted

NatureEcoEvo‏Verified account @NatureEcoEvo Mar 6

More

Two million years of flaking stone and the evolutionary efficiency of stone tool technology http://rdcu.be/Iq1c 

Comment by Stephen on April 15, 2018 at 3:49pm

She looks like a Florence 

Comment by Mrs.B on April 15, 2018 at 2:08pm

Ok, so who was in my house with a damn camera?

Comment by Doone on April 15, 2018 at 6:36am

Homo floresiensis #Hobbit Reconstruction by Elisabeth Daynès was based on hominin fossils discovered at Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 http://artshebdomedias.com/wp-content/uploads/daynes_flores.jpg …

Comment by Mrs.B on April 14, 2018 at 9:54pm

Stealing that!

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