responsible for the killing of much of the North American wildlife.
Clovis Overkill Didn't Wipe Out California's Sea Duck
Clovis-age natives, often noted for overhunting during their brief
dominance in a primitive North America, deserve clemency in the case
of California's flightless sea duck. New evidence says it took
thousands of years for the duck to die out.
Newswise -- Clovis-age natives, often noted for overhunting during
their brief dominance in a primitive North America, deserve clemency
in the case of California's flightless sea duck. New evidence says it
took thousands of years for the duck to die out.
A team of six scientists, including Jon M. Erlandson of the University
of Oregon, pronounced their verdict in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences (online, March 13) after holding court on
thousands of years of archaeological testimony taken from bones of the
extinct sea duck uncovered from 14 sites on islands off the California
Coast and 12 mainland sites from southern California northward.
Erlandson and his co-authors from California Polytechnic State
University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the California
Department of Parks and Recreation (CDPR) and the California
Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) demonstrated
that humans first hunted the flightless sea duck (Chendytes lawi) more
than 10,000 years ago, but the bird persisted until about 2,400 years
ago. Their findings that Chendytes survived more than 7,500 years of
human predation are based on the first radiocarbon dating of Chendytes
bones from six coastal archaeological sites.
Erlandson and colleagues, along with UO alum Don Grayson, now a
University of Washington archaeologist, suggest that the drawn-out
road to the ducks' extinction raises serious questions about the
"Pleistocene over-kill theory" that the Paleoindian Clovis culture
rapidly hunted numerous large mammals and other animals to extinction
on their arrival in the Americas in the late Pleistocene.
The ducks' lifestyle served them well for millennia, the researchers
noted. Many of the birds nested on the Channel Islands off the
California Coast, where few predators existed before humans arrived.
After seafaring Paleoindians colonized the islands about 13,000 years
ago, however, Chendytes may have been driven to smaller and more
remote islands. Human population growth, the development of
increasingly sophisticated watercraft, and the introduction of dogs
and foxes to the islands probably put greater pressure on the birds.
Eventually, the flightless duck, like great auk in the North Atlantic,
had no place to run.
The five co-authors with Erlandson, an archaeologist in the UO
department of anthropology, were: Terry L. Jones (corresponding
author), head of social sciences at California Polytechnic;
archaeologist Judy F. Porcasi and Thomas A. Wake of UCLA's Cotsen
Institute of Archaeology; H. Dallas Jr. of CAL FIRE; and Rae
Schwaderer of CDPR. The paper, published online in advance of regular
publication, is freely available on the PNAS Web site.
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