Stone Age People Drove Dwarf Hippos and Elephants to Extinction on Cyprus

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Stone Age People Drove Dwarf Hippos and Elephants to Extinction on Cyprus

By

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et al./The Conversation

Imagine growing up beside the eastern Mediterranean Sea 14,000 years ago. You’re an accomplished sailor of the small watercraft you and your fellow villagers make, and you live off both the sea and the land.

But times have been difficult — there just isn’t the same amount of game or fish around as when you were a child. Maybe it’s time to look elsewhere for food.

Now imagine 

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 than ever before in your 

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, accompanied maybe by a few others, when suddenly you spot something on the horizon. Is that an island?

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The western coast of Cyprus. (CJA Bradshaw / Flinders University)

An island of tiny elephants and hippos

Welcome to 

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 as the world emerges from the 

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. You are the first human to set your eyes on this huge, 

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 teeming with food.

When you beach your boat to have a look around, you can’t believe what you’re seeing — tiny boar-sized hippos and horse-sized elephants that look like ******* to your eyes. There are so many of them, and you’re hungry after the long journey.

The diminutive beasts don’t seem to show any *****. You easily ***** a few and preserve the meat as best you can for the long journey back.

When you get home, you are excited to let everyone in the village know what you’ve found. Soon enough, you organize a major expedition back to the island.

Of course, we’ll never know if this kind of scenario took place, but it’s a plausible story of how and when the 

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. It also illustrates how they might have quickly brought about the demise of the 

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 Phanourios minor, as well as the 

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 Palaeoloxodon cypriotes.

Dwarf ‘giants’

Cyprus wasn’t the only Mediterranean island with dwarf wildlife. In fact, Crete, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and many other islands had their own 

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 and 

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.

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 — the process in which a once large, mainland species evolves to become smaller in response to fewer resources and predators — is in fact quite common. Unfortunately, the process also makes such species 

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, including the arrival of new predators such as humans.

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Skeleton of a dwarf hippo (Phanourios minor) and artist’s reconstruction of the animal displayed at the Akamas Geology and Paleontology Information Centre in Pano Arodes, western Cyprus. (

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)

 

The Cypriot dwarf hippopotamus was the 

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 in the Mediterranean region. Genetic data suggest 

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 from the 

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 (Hippopotamus amphibius) roughly 1.5 million years ago.

The Cypriot dwarf elephant was less than 10% of the size of its mainland ancestor, 

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 (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) that inhabited Europe and Western Asia during the Middle and Late Pleistocene.

An extinction controversy

For a long time, many 

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 and 

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 didn’t believe humans had anything to do with the extinction of these two “

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” species on Cyprus.

The doubters assumed that either people arrived well after the extinctions, or the earliest humans were too few to be able to ***** off entire species.

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Teeth and bones of dwarf elephants (Paleoloxodon cypriotes) displayed at the Akamas Geology and Paleontology Information Centre in Cyprus. (CJA Bradshaw/Flinders University)

Earlier this year we showed that 

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, well before hippos and elephants went extinct. We also showed that the human population likely grew to several thousand within a few hundred years of arrival. But we didn’t know whether this human population was large enough to drive the dwarf hippos and elephants to extinction.

Our new 

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 answers this question with a combination of several different types of mathematical models.

Could a small human population cause extinction?

Even though these animals are long extinct, we can draw some conclusions about their likely population because we can estimate their weights from paleontological information. The dwarf hippo weighed around 130kg, and the dwarf elephant came in at just over 500kg.

We also know how to translate weights to estimates of population size, longevity, survival and fertility. We can even use data collected from related species still living today, such as the 

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 and the 

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, to estimate how fast they would have grown.

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Map of Cyprus showing the approximate position of fossil sites where dwarf elephants and hippos have been retrieved. (Map created by CJA Bradshaw/

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)

With this information, we built computer models of what would have happened to the two mini-megafauna species on Cyprus when human hunters arrived. We estimated how efficient human hunters would be, how long it would take them to process each carcass, and how much energy hunter-gatherers need to survive.

We also estimated how much of the human diet included these species, and how this proportion might have changed as the dwarf hippo and elephant numbers dwindled.

We found that even a small human population, numbering between 3,000 and 7,000, could have easily driven first dwarf hippos, and then dwarf elephants, to extinction. Our model showed the process would have taken less than 1,000 years. This prediction matches the sequence of extinction inferred from the paleontological record.

Our results provide strong evidence that Paleolithic peoples in Cyprus were at least partially, if not entirely, responsible for megafauna extinctions during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene.

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Limestone caves like the ones here are often where megafauna fossil ******** are found in Cyprus. (CJA Bradshaw / Flinders University)

Cyprus was the perfect place to test our models because the island offers an ideal set of conditions to examine whether the arrival of humans ultimately led to the extinction of its megafauna. This is because Cyprus was a relatively simple test case – a small island of around 11,000 square kilometres at the time, with only two species of megafauna.

Our research therefore improves our understanding of how even small human populations can disrupt ecosystems and cause major extinctions, particularly in times of rapid environmental change.

Top image: Muzzle of a dwarf Liberian hippo.  Source:

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Stock

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by

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et al. on 

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, and has been republished under a Creative Commons License.

References

Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Frédérik Saltré, Stefani A. Crabtree, ********** Reepmeyer, Theodora Moutsiou. Small populations of Palaeolithic humans in Cyprus hunted endemic megafauna to extinction.  Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2024; 291 (2031) DOI: 

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#Stone #Age #People #Drove #Dwarf #Hippos #Elephants #Extinction #Cyprus

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