Humans and meat: The combo that was always bad for the environment

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Publisher: Pamela Rice
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The VivaVine (Fall 2001, Vol. 10, No. 4)

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If you thought meat consumption has been disrupting the environment only since the advent of factory farming--perhaps 50 years ago or so--you may need to think again. Human hunters in prehistoric times drove many species of the Earth's largest animals to extinction in North America and Australia in relatively short periods of time, according to two recent studies. Don't blame advancing glaciers or ancient epidemics for the megafauna kill-offs that reveal themselves in the fossil record. Early man, with a fierce appetite for meat and armed simply with spears, fire, and "other primitive killing techniques"--as the San Francisco Chronicle put it--wiped clean more than half of the large animals of the Americas in just a thousand years--and all of the largest animals in Australia in just 10,000 years. Marsupials the size of hippos and armadillos the size of Volkswagens, among others, were their victims. The studies were reported on in the June 8 edition of Science.

Extinctions were "cataclysmic," according to researcher John Alroy of the National Center for Ecological Analysis at the University of Santa Barbara. Yet since they took place over generations, "the results show how much havoc our species can cause, without anyone at the time having the slightest idea of what was going on."

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