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The African bush elephant (foreground), Earth's largest extant land animal, and the Masai ostrich (background), one of Earth's largest extant birds. In zoology, megafauna (from Greek μέγας megas "large" and Neo-Latin fauna "animal life") are large animals. The precise definition of the term varies widely, though a common threshold is ...
This is a list of dates associated with the prehistoric peopling of the world (first known presence of Homo sapiens). The list is divided into four categories, Middle Paleolithic (before 50,000 years ago), Upper Paleolithic (50,000 to 12,500 years ago), Holocene (12,500 to 500 years ago) and Modern ( Age of Sail and modern exploration).
This has variously been explained as: retention of a hypothetically tall ancestral condition; higher-quality diet and nutrition due to the hunting of megafauna which later became uncommon or extinct; functional adaptation to increase stride length and movement efficiency while running during a hunt; increasing territorialism among later Cro ...
Human impact on megafauna populations is thought to have been driven by hunting ("overkill"), [4] [5] as well as possibly environmental alteration. [6] The relative importance of human vs climatic factors in the extinctions has been the subject of long-running controversy. [3]
Due to the evidence that Paleoindians hunted now extinct megafauna (large animals), and that following a period of overlap, most large animals across the Americas became extinct as part of the Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, it has been argued by many authors that hunting by Paleoindians was an important factor in the extinctions, [90 ...
Mass extinctions are characterized by the loss of at least 75% of species within a geologically short period of time (i.e., less than 2 million years). [18] [51] The Holocene extinction is also known as the "sixth extinction", as it is possibly the sixth mass extinction event, after the Ordovician–Silurian extinction events, the Late Devonian extinction, the Permian–Triassic extinction ...
Overview map of the peopling of the world by early humans during the Upper Paleolithic, following the Southern Dispersal paradigm. The so-called "recent dispersal" of modern humans took place about 70–50,000 years ago. [60] [61] [62] It is this migration wave that led to the lasting spread of modern humans throughout the world.
Human history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers.They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.