Essay About The Extinction Of The Megafauna

About 41,000 years ago, a major part of the Australian environment became extinct, the Australian Megafauna (Australian Science, 2012). There have been many investigated causes for this, but the scientific community cannot decide on one for sure. This is due to lack of evidence for each theory. The most common current theories about the extinction are over hunting, climate change and disease.
One of the possible causes of extinction of the megafauna is climate change. This is predicted as the megafauna all around the world became extinct close to the end of the last ice age and just and the climate was getting warmer (Florek, 2015). This can be seen all around the world at the end of the last ice age, a lot of species became extinct due to the incapability to adapt fast enough. This can be seen as after the ice age began, especially in
The evidence for this lies in the fact that humans were on Australia approximately 60,000 years ago and this means that the megafauna must have interacted with humans for at least 30,000 years (Florek, 2015). Obviously, a way of food gathering for humans is hunting and large meaty mammals would be a ‘no-brainer’ option for hunting. But, it is unlikely that they would have been able to hunt them to extinction for two main reasons. Firstly, the human population was a very low level at the time and therefore, we may not have had the knowledge, tools are shear strength as a species to be able to hunt the megafauna to extinction. Another reason why this is unlikely is because it gets increasingly harder to completely kill of a species, the less they become. This is because as you start to lower the victim’s population, the harder it would be to find the left over animals. This would mean more effort in hunting and as stated before, our population was not nearly big enough to be able to do that successfully. Yet this theory is still backed up by many scientists (Australian Science,