Hunters Off the Hook for Bison DeclinesSo evil, greedy humans are off the hook for the demise of those huggable bison, mammoths, bears, and lions. (It's not "fair game" to feed and clothe a human, you know.) But that's okay, because climate change was to blame. Oh, but that was thousands of years ago, before evil, greedy humans messed up the climate. What's going on here?
Sat Nov 27, 5:05 AM ET
By DIEDTRA HENDERSON, AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON - Big game hunters may be off the hook in the latest twist of a prehistoric whodunit that tries to explain why bison populations sharply crashed thousands of years ago.
Proponents of the overkill theory blamed the first Americans to cross an ice-free corridor — connecting what's now Alaska and Siberia — for hunting bison within a whisper of disappearance. Those super hunters are also faulted for pushing massive mammals, like woolly mammoths, short-faced bears and North American lions into extinction.
A team of 27 scientists used ancient DNA to track the hulking herbivore's boom-and-bust population patterns, adding to growing evidence that climate change was to blame....
What's going on here is that the forces of the universe have immensely more influence on the fate of Earth and its creatures than does human endeavor. Global-warming worriers, for example, don't like to hear that the Sun's energy output is at an 8,000 year peak and that large-scale climate changes in the past 1,000 years coincide with sunspot activity.
Humans are to blame for everything. Especially if they're Judeo-Christian, white, male, Western humans.
