Description given on Youtube:
Imagine travelling back in time to around 50 thousand years ago. What a remarkable place Australia would have been! It was a continent not only gripped by vast swings and shifts in climate, but one that was ruled by the ‘megafauna’, the largest land animals to have evolved since the dinosaurs.
Australian megafauna were extremely diverse, and included a variety of super-sized marsupials, birds, snakes, lizards and turtles. But what happened to them? Why did they become extinct?
A flurry of recent scientific papers have pointed the finger directly at the culprit: human hunters did it shortly after their arrival on the continent. Many researchers argue climate change would have played little to no role in the extinctions.
But is the evidence really that clear-cut? Join palaeoecologist Dr Gilbert Price as he looks at the datasets and discusses what we say we know, versus what we actually know.
Dr Gilbert Price is s a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland. His Ph.D. and subsequent post-doctoral projects have spanned a wide breadth of distinctive research fields that include palaeoecology, geochronology, zoology and modern conservation. He is especially focused on the extinction of Australia’s Pleistocene megafauna.
You can read more about Gilbert on his blog: www.diprotodon.com