Why did all the large mammals die out after the ice age?

Question

Can someone explain whether it was the over hunting of humans or the ice age that killed off such animals such as the woolly rhino;mammoths etc.Could humans at the time have had such an enormous impact and if so how did it become global.PS-no sarcastic answers please from all you boffins who think that such questions are trivial.....i am new to all this.Thanks

Answer 1

Large animals need a lot of food to keep going, but the ice age wiped out nearly all food sources, such as animals and plants. So the bigger animals had nothing to live on.

Maybe this is what also happened to the dinosaurs. The meteor destroyed a lot of food sources and the food chain screwed up.

The smaller animals survived because their food sources were in sufficient amounts.

Before the ice age, there were two human species. Homo Sapiens and the 'Neanderthals'. We survived because we had enough food and were intelligent enough to make clothing and build shelters and make fires. Apparently, the Neanderthals weren't bright enough for this and were 'killed off.'

Answer 2

I there was an incredible die off of "mega fauna" at the end of the last ice age. The mammoths (and there was more than one species) are probably the best known example, but it also includes the woolly rhinoceros, cave bears and the Irish Elk. I doubt that humans could have been solely responsible. We had, after all, been living along side them right through the ice age.

Instead, I believe the problem was climate change. There is evidence that ice ages start and stop with amazing speed, a matter of a few years. That kind of rapid change puts enormous pressure on large animal with slow reproductive rates and specialised requirements.

To put it simply, the world changed faster than they could, so there was no room for them anymore.

The Neanderthal problem is more complex. There human competition whether active (conflict) or passive (out competition) was probably more significant that climate.

Answer 3

They didn't. The biggest post Ice-Age extinctions occurred in North America.

The extinction event in Australia had already happened by this time, via burn-hunting: the "aborigines" would set fire to a forest, to drive animals out.

1. Meteor possibility. Recently mammoth tusks have been analyzed and found to have little meteoric bits in them -- as if all of North America were hit by birdshot about 13,000 years ago. It (allegedly) affected lots of species, including people -- the Folsom point hunters disappeared about this time too.
This isn't a good theory because it doesn't explain why the large mammals that still exist survived.

2. There was another wave of mammals coming across the Bering land bridge about this time, including new humans. It's possible that diseases came along with them to which the North American animals had no immunity.

3. Wasteful hunting methods. The people who came in around that time were hunters, and killed more than they really needed to, by driving herds off cliffs, among other things.

4. The sabre-tooth cats were probably specialist hunters, preferring only a limited range of prey. When that disappeared, so did the sabre-tooth cats.

Answer 4

1) All of the large mammals did not die out. We still have the whales, moose, elephants, rhinos and hippos.

2) Climate change at the end of the ice age meant that less nutritious trees and shrubs kept springing up where vast grasslands used to be. We may never know whether that was a bigger factor in the extinction of the wooly mammoth, giant deer, wooly rhino, and steppe lion than hunting, but it definitely played a role.

Answer 5

Woolly mammoths etc actually evolved because of the ice age (they out-competed less woolly varieties because of their better adaptatin to the cold climate).

As to why they died out after the ice age, there doesn't seem to be an agreed answer; no doubt a mix of hunting / climate change / disease.

The link below gives quite a good overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth