Ancient Egypt’s highly decorated tombs and funerary objects—meant to ensure a safe trip into the afterlife—also hold a rich record of the region’s wildlife. Now scientists have used that art, along with other paleontological, archaeological and historical evidence, to map out the rise and fall of Egypt’s large mammals and match those patterns to changes in climate and human interactions. The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer an unprecedented glimpse into the ways population growth and climate change can influence an ecosystem over millennia—perhaps giving scientists crucial insight into the long-term impacts of modern human activities. Justin Yeakel at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues began with a book, The Mammals of Ancient Egypt, which documented the distribution of animal communities from their artistic representations and historical records. According to the book, for example, two species of rhinoceroses had once been present but had disappeared by the Late Predynastic or Early Dynastic periods, approximately 5,000 years ago. The researchers then combined this information with other animal records, such as ancient writings. Lions, for instance, were present during the time of Herodotus, around 2,400 years ago, but had become rare a little over a century later, according to Aristotle. To analyze the patterns of extinctions, the scientists created a computer model that let them relate the disappearances to predator-prey dynamics and changes in local climate. Previous geological and paleontological research shows that the Egypt of 6,000 years ago was very different from the landscape today. smithsonianmag/science/egypts-mammal-extinctions-tracked-through-6000-years-art-180952641/?utm_source=facebook&no-ist
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 07:36:57 +0000
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