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EEGS Seminar Series
January 31 at 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science presents the “The Perilous Past —An Exploration of the Ice Age world for the America’s First Peoples” seminar, as part of the Earth, Environmental and Geographic Sciences (EEGS) Seminar Series.
About the talk
Advances in the understanding of the Ice Age world’s hazards, and timing of the migration of the first peoples into the Americas have given us insights into life during those times. Previous studies determined humans arrived at about the same time as the Pleistocene extinctions and workers concluded that the coincidence was actually a cause-and-effect relationship, where people eradicated the megafauna.
A careful look suggests that the megafauna may not have been as susceptible to human overkill. We’ll do a survey of the dominant animals, in modern and ancient times, including species regarded as prey, and super predators. Comparisons will be made, in terms of their potential as predator or prey. We can then evaluate whether humans were truly capable of wreaking havoc, or were just another item on the menu.
The apparently short period of time between widely accepted conventional ideas of human invasion and Pleistocene species’ extinction is revised because new sites demonstrate people were in the Americas twice as long as previously supposed. Humans lived alongside the megafauna for upwards of 15,000 years, which negates the overkill hypothesis. We’ll explore what that meant for their lifestyle, after evaluating what was here, and how potentially hazardous the world was. We know that it looks like humans didn’t become numerous until the Pleistocene superpredators went extinct.
Speaker
Dr. Robert Young
Associate Professor, Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographic Sciences
This is a free public event; no pre-registration is required.
