Thousands of years before a small pygmy hippopotamus from a zoo in Thailand named Moo Dang became an internet sensationan extinct species of pygmy hippos (Phanourios little) roamed a lush Mediterranean island. These small hippos and dwarf elephants (Palaeoloxodon Cypriots) lived in Cyprus. That is, until Paleolithic humans arrived and both species disappeared about 14,000 years ago.
Now an international team of scientists has discovered that the first Paleolithic hunter-gatherers may have driven first hippos and then elephants to extinction in less than 1,000 years. This new hypothesis refutes some previous arguments that suggested a small human population on the island could not have caused these extinctions so quickly. The findings are detailed in a study published September 17 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.
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Cyprus was home to only these two species of megafauna during the Late Pleistocene. The dwarf elephant was around 1,000 pounds, compared to its much larger modern counterparts which can reach as much as 12,000 pounds. The dwarf hippopotamus was about 286 pounds, compared to the 9,000 pounds that adult hippos weigh today. Both species disappeared shortly after humans arrived about 14,000 years ago.
Previous research found that large groups of hundreds to thousands of people may have arrived in Cyprus two or three major migration events in less than a millennium. The influx of people affected the island’s megafauna. However, other extinction events have occurred over thousands of years, so it is a paleontological mystery for both species to disappear from the fossil record in such a short time.
In the new studythe team built mathematical models that combined data from several scientific fields, including paleontology and archaeology. The model’s predictions matched the timeline of megafauna such as these elephants and hippos disappearing from the paleontological record on the island.
“Cyprus is the perfect location to test our models because the island offers ideal conditions to investigate whether the arrival of human populations ultimately led to the extinction of its megafauna species,” said Theodora Moutsiou, co-author and archaeologist of the study. the University of Cyprus, said in a statement. “This is because Cyprus is an insular environment and can provide a window back in time through our data.”
Based on their reconstructions of human energy needs, diet composition, prey selection and hunting efficiency, the models show that the roughly 3,000 to 7,000 hunter-gatherers in Cyprus probably responsible for the extinction of both the pygmy hippopotamus and the pygmy elephant.
“Our results therefore provide strong evidence that Paleolithic peoples on Cyprus were at least partly responsible for the extinction of megafauna during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene,” says Corey Bradshaw, co-author and paleoecologist from Flinders University in Australia. said in a statement. “The main determinant of extinction risk for both species was the proportion of edible meat they provided to the first people on the island.”
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According to the teamthis type of model can be used to better understand the impact that small human populations can have on native ecosystems and how this leads to major extinctions. The research is also part of a Initiative of the University of Cyprus called MIGRATE (Modelling Demography and Adaptation in the Initial Peopling of the Eastern Mediterranean Islandscape) which aims to better understand this critical period in the island’s prehistory.
