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News: Giant kangaroo likely killed off by humans
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Submitted by coldrum on Tuesday, 02 January 2007 Page Views: 512
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 Country: Australia
External Links:
  Australia's giant prehistoric animals, including three-meter (10-foot) -tall kangaroos, were likely wiped out by aboriginal settlers, not climate change, a researcher has revealed.
The question of what killed Australia's so-called megafauna — including giant kangaroos and wombat-like creatures as big as a rhinoceros — during the last Ice Age divides paleontologists.
The most popular theories are that climate change drove the giants to extinction more than 40,000 years ago or that Aborigines, who arrived in Australia as far back as 60,000 years ago, were responsible because of over hunting or burning the vegetation upon which the creatures fed.
But new fossil evidence from the Naracoorte Caves region of South Australia state ruled out climate change as the cause, according an article published in the latest edition of the Geological Society of America's monthly journal, "Geology."
The article's author, Flinders University paleontologist Gavin Prideaux, said Tuesday his research team's work in the caves indicated humans had a hand in the animals' extinction, although they found no direct evidence of human intervention.
"If it wasn't climate, then it had to be humans," Prideaux told The Associated Press.
"The real issue now is trying to resolve whether it was hunting or whether it was landscape destruction through burning ... and a bit of both is more likely," he added.
Prideaux headed an Australian research team that recorded rainfall in the Naracoorte region over 500,000 years by examining stalagmites in the caves and studying sediments.
More: MSNBC
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