Did humans hunt and eat dinosaurs?

Did humans hunt and eat woolly mammoths or dinosaurs? – Jasmine, age 10, New South Wales, Australia

Hello Jasmine,

Thanks for this great question!

Humans can be blamed for many things: clearing rainforests, exacerbating climate change, and extinguishing valuable species such as thylacine. But are humans also responsible for hunting and eating woolly mammoths and dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs never fell prey to humans, mostly because dinosaurs and humans never met (despite what was shown in the Jurassic Park movie). Dinosaurs have been extinct for around 62 million years when modern humans lived on this planet!

But what about the woolly mammoth? In this respect, the film Ice Age is actually accurate. Humans and woolly mammoths coexist On occasion at least 15,000 years.

Mammoth found in the fossil record

So humans hunted woolly mammoths until they went extinct? To answer this question we need to look at the clues in the fossil record of the preserved remains of ancient life.

In the case of the Dodo bird, which is a large bird without the ability to fly that it was extinctdocuments from 1690 make it clear that humans were to blame for excessive hunting.

However, woolly mammoths existed long before humans had paper to write on. They existed about 300,000 years ago, when ice still covered the northern part of the world.

In fact, when they became extinct, a small number of pygmy mammoths support on a small, remote Arctic island up to about 4000 years ago. However, a large species of woolly mammoth disappeared from an area called Beringia (located between Siberia and Alaska) about 12,000 years ago after coexisting with humans for at least 15,000 years.

Did humans kill them?

Look for clues

When early humans hunted, they tended to kill a number of animals at the same time. This creates what is referred to as a “kill site” which literally means a huge pile of animal bones. When they extracted the meat from the bones to eat it, they used stone tools that left small scars and scratches on the bones.

These signs now provide important clues. In Beringia, there is fossil evidence of mammoth killing sites and scars on mammoth bones. That is, these clues provide information that humans once hunted woolly mammoths.

However, the strongest evidence to found in southern Poland in 2019. A small piece of a stone tool turned into a spear blade by humans was found in the ribs of a woolly mammoth. If this is evidence presented at the murder trial, the person will be arrested immediately!

Even so, does this mean that only humans were responsible for the extinction of the great woolly mammoth?

Some scientists to say that climate also influenced their extinction.

Perhaps at that time the climate became very hostile to woolly mammoths. As a result, their number has decreased significantly. This may have made the remaining mammoths more vulnerable to hunting which has increased with the increase in the human population.

“Mammoth” Australia

Australia has no woolly mammoths. Due to their thick fur, they will not survive in hot climates. However, Australia had giant animals known as megafauna that went extinct between 5,000 and 17,000 years (depending on the species) after the natives arrived.

Interestingly, the fossil evidence that can be used to identify those hunters megafauna ancient not found. There are no known murder sites, no scars on the animal’s bones, and no evidence of waves piercing the animal’s ribs.

Are megafauna extinctions related to human activities? Or does climate change also play a role?

This question is still unanswered. However, as more and more fossils are discovered, the better we can study them and the more likely it is to understand what happened many years ago.

Read more:
Curious Kids: Could Dinosaurs Return To Exist?

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Zalfa Imani Trijatna of the University of Indonesia translated this article from English.