The Remaking of Australia's Ecology

摘要

What was the impact of early human populations on pristine ecosystems? Studies of this question have focused on the possibility that humans caused extinctions of large mammals. For example, the arrival of modern humans in the Americas -11,000 years ago coincided with the disappearance of mammoths, ground sloths, and many other large mammals (7). However, the role of humans is difficult to determine in this case because the climate was also changing rapidly as the last ice age came to an end; climatechange, not human impact, may have caused the extinctions.