The unwanted guests thread.

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by cicciobuki

I don't mind a spider in my house. Then again, i don't live in Australia where everything is out to kill you!

-6 million Last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees.
-2.5 million Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools.
-2 million Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human
species.
- 500,000 Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East.
- 300,000 Daily usage of fire.
- 200,000 Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa.
- 70,000 The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language.
Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa.
- 45,000 Sapiens settle Australia. Extinction of Australian megafauna.
- 30,000 Extinction of Neanderthals.
- 16,000 Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American megafauna.
- 13,000 Extinction of Homo floresiensis. Homo sapiens the only surviving human species.

Fishing villages might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45,000 years ago. These may have been the base from which Homo sapiens launched its first transoceanic enterprise: the invasion of Australia. [...]
The first human footprint on a sandy Australian beach was immediately washed away by the waves. Yet when the invaders advanced inland, they left behind a different footprint, one that would never be expunged. As they pushed on, they encountered a strange universe of unknown creatures that included a 200 kilogram, two-metre kangaroo, and a marsupial lion, as massive as a modern tiger, that was the continent’s largest predator. Koalas far too big to be cuddly and cute rustled in the trees and flightless birds twice the size of ostriches sprinted on the plains. Dragon-like lizards and snakes five metres long slithered through the undergrowth. The giant diprotodon, a two-and-a-half-ton wombat, roamed the forests. Except for the birds and reptiles, all these animals were marsupials – like kangaroos, they gave birth to tiny, helpless, fetus-like young which they then nurtured with milk in abdominal pouches. Marsupial mammals were almost unknown in Africa and Asia, but in Australia they reigned supreme. Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing fifty kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct. A large number of smaller species also disappeared. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged. It was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years. Was it all the fault of Homo sapiens?
[...]
Large animals – the primary victims of the Australian extinction – breed slowly.
Pregnancy is long, offspring per pregnancy are few, and there are long breaks between pregnancies. Consequently, if humans cut down even one diprotodon every few months, it would be enough to cause diprotodon deaths to outnumber births. Within a few thousand years the last, lonesome diprotodon would pass away, and with her the entire species.
[…]
Thirdly, mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part of the Outer World. In these cases Sapiens guilt is irrefutable. For example, the megafauna of New Zealand – which had weathered the alleged ‘climate change’ of c.45,000 years ago without a scratch – suffered devastating blows immediately after the first humans set foot on the islands. The Maoris, New Zealand’s first Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800 years ago. Within a couple of centuries, the majority of the local megafauna was extinct, along with 60 per cent of all bird species.
A similar fate befell the mammoth population of Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean (200 kilometres north of the Siberian coast). Mammoths had flourished for millions of years over most of the northern hemisphere, but as Homo sapiens spread – first over Eurasia and then over North America – the mammoths retreated. By 10,000 years ago there was not a single mammoth to be found in the world, except on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel. The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the first humans reached the island.
Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt. But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.

Don't blame Australian animals killing a few Homo sapiens each year.

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

Don't blame Australian animals killing a few Homo sapiens each year.

Now you know why we pump a lot of dollars into luring tourists here

[SanteeFats]

Boy I sure hope scoundrel likes the way this thread has veered from helping him get rid of meese's to this.