Australia's giant prehistoric animals, including three-meter (10-foot) -tall
kangaroos, were likely wiped out by aboriginal settlers, not climate change, a
researcher said Tuesday.
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.
Copyright 2006, Associated Press
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