Human population boom may have doomed Madagascar ’s giant animals

Two thousand years ago, lemurs the size of humans and giant “elephant birds” roamed Madagascar. A thousand years later, they were nearly gone. This mass extinction coincided with a boom in Madagascar’s human population, according to a new study, when two small groups of people linked up and took over the island. It’s an “exciting” study, says Laurie Godfrey, a paleontologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved. The results, she says, add genetic support to the idea that a growing human population and a shift to agricultural lifestyles did in these giant animals. The new study traces back to 2007, when Jean-Aim é Rakotoarisoa, an archaeologist at the University of Antananarivo, and a multidisciplinary group of researchers created the Madagascar Genetic and Ethnolinguistic project to study the long-debated question of the ancestry of the Malagasy, the island’s major native ethnic group . Though Madagascar is located about 425 kilometers off the east coast of Africa, the Malagasy language is similar to Austronesian languages spoken 7000 kilometers across the Indian Ocean. There’s long been “a question about when, who, [and] how people came to Madagascar,” and how they influenced the mass extinction, Rakotoarisoa says. Between 2007 and 2014 the team traveled to 257 villages around the island. They collected saliva samples and musical, linguistic, and other social scie...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news