Megafauna.com

If we could travel back in time, and habituate a group of late-Pliocene hominins to ourselves the way Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall did with gorilla and chimp groups, we’d probably come to regard some of them with the affection and respect Fossey felt for Digit, and Goodall had for Flo. We’d like and respect them, though, as fellow-creatures rather than fellow-humans. The sexual and emotional parts of our minds would probably insist that beings like Australopithecus garhi an...d Homo habilis are vastly different from ourselves. Imagine alien species such as these walking upright like humans through the Pliocene bushveld. About a million years will go by before the family of which they are members will learn to use fire, but these beings do not exist in a state of technological naivety. They could be carrying digging, fruit-hooking and hunting sticks, and one or more of them might, as I’ve suggested, be wearing pouches containing raw materials for the manufacture of stone tools and, perhaps, a favorite hammerstone. Those pouches might also contain non-utilitarian but interesting objects like shells or stones that caught the eye of their finder. A remarkable jasperite manuport from Makapansgat in South Africa, brought to that site by a hominin between 2.5 and 3 million years ago, has two holes representing eyes, and another representing a mouth. These features weren’t carved into that flat, oval stonethe stone’s resemblance to a hominin face is accidental, but almost certainly the reason why it was picked up.

Giant Tortoises: first species wiped out by the human family? It’s a late Winter morning in the East African Pliocene some 3.75 million years ago, and you’re a 3-foot 9-inch tall, 65 pound, female member of Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis. Under other circumstances you might be enjoying this warm Winter sun, but you’ve had nothing to eat but a small scorpion and a handful of merula nuts in the last few days. Last night your milk dried up, and it’s beginning to look...Continue reading

Asiatic cheetahs do survive -- barely -- in Iran. They seem a bit more hairy. Not that much snow to contend with in Africa....

Mauricio Anton on creating this image of the extinct American Cheetah: "I gave the extinct cat a hypothetical coat color pattern that is not especially cheetah-like, trying to reflect the concept that it was not a true cheetah. Fossil and genetic evidence suggests that, while pumas, Old World cheetahs and American cheetahs are closely related and have a common ancestor not shared with other cats, Miracinonyx developed its adaptations for speed independently from the Old World Acinonyx. If this is true, and it seems to be, then this would be a very remarkable example of convergent evolution."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-51279206

Confusion and disagreement aplenty: Yuval Harari, author of the best-selling Sapiens thinks that humans are cruel and dangerous by nature. Others imagine that our species only become ecologically destructive when it lost the spiritual connection that still guides its indigenous members to hunt, gather or farm in a sustainable way. Svante Pääbo, the eminent paleogeneticist, recently speculated that a little inversion on a particular chromosome could have produced a madness gene which set our species apart from the rest of the biosphere and made all this happen and changed the whole ecosystem of the planet and made us dominate everything.

Why we SHOULD blame overpopulation! Homo sapiens has become, the great biologist E. O. Wilson tells us, a hundred times times more numerous than any other land animal of comparable size in the history of life. Is this state of affairs unconnected to the fact that, in only the last few decades of this explosive population growth, an incredible 60% of the wild mammal, bird, fish and reptile populations that were in existence as recently as 1970 have disappeared? https://theconversation.com/why-we-should-be-wary-of-blamin

If we could travel back in time, and habituate a group of late-Pliocene hominins to ourselves the way Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall did with gorilla and chimp groups, we’d probably come to regard some of them with the affection and respect Fossey felt for Digit, and Goodall had for Flo. We’d like and respect them, though, as fellow-creatures rather than fellow-humans. The sexual and emotional parts of our minds would probably insist that beings like Australopithecus garhi an...d Homo habilis are vastly different from ourselves. Imagine alien species such as these walking upright like humans through the Pliocene bushveld. About a million years will go by before the family of which they are members will learn to use fire, but these beings do not exist in a state of technological naivety. They could be carrying digging, fruit-hooking and hunting sticks, and one or more of them might, as I’ve suggested, be wearing pouches containing raw materials for the manufacture of stone tools and, perhaps, a favorite hammerstone. Those pouches might also contain non-utilitarian but interesting objects like shells or stones that caught the eye of their finder. A remarkable jasperite manuport from Makapansgat in South Africa, brought to that site by a hominin between 2.5 and 3 million years ago, has two holes representing eyes, and another representing a mouth. These features weren’t carved into that flat, oval stonethe stone’s resemblance to a hominin face is accidental, but almost certainly the reason why it was picked up.