Expert: Aborigines wiped out Australia’s prehistoric giants

AUSTRALIA’S giant prehistoric animals, including 10-foot-tall kangaroos and wombat-like creatures as big as rhinoceroses, were likely wiped out by aboriginal settlers, not climate change, a researcher said yesterday.

The question of what killed Australia’s so-called megafauna 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 overhunting or burning the vegetation upon which the creatures fed.

But new fossil evidence from the Naracoorte Caves region of South Australia ruled out climate change as the cause, according an article published in the Geological Society of America’s monthly journal, Geology.

“If it wasn’t climate, it had to be humans,” Flinders University paleontologist Gavin Prideaux said.

“The real issue is trying to resolve whether it was hunting or landscape destruction through burning… a bit of both is more likely.

“Our evidence shows that the Naracoorte giants perished under climatic conditions similar to those under which they previously thrived, which strongly implicates humans in their extinction,” Prideaux said.

Critics of the theory include Charles Darwin University ecology expert David Bowman, who argued Aborigines did not have the population density or the technology to efficiently wipe out the mammals.