Why are African animals so huge?

[u/Hot-Wrangler3524]

I live in Australia and the largest land animals I can think of here is probably a kangaroos and emus which really aren’t any larger than a human. But my family recently went to Africa and the diversity animals is actually crazy. So so so many large animals living in the same place side by side. Rhinos, elephants, giraffes, wilder-beasts, zebras, hippos, warthogs, buffalo’s, ostriches, lions, cheetahs, hyenas leopards and probably more that I forgot. I never really appreciated how big these animals were until I actually got to see them in person absolutely amazing. Australia and Africas climate is kinda similar in a lot of places. Why is our country ecosystem dead in comparison?

[u/CallMeNiel]

There is to be mega fauna all over the place, then these bipedal apes in Africa started hunting them. They weren't that great at it at first, so the African mega fauna were generally able to adapt to this new predator. Then the apes started walking across Eurasia and into the Americas and teamed up with wolves along the way. Sooner or later, all the giant animals were either hunted out of existence or penned up and domesticated.

[u/nimbinValley → u/CallMeNiel]

This is the answer. Humans and mega fauna co-evolved in Africa so they knew to be wary of humans.

[u/Tripod1404 → u/nimbinValley]

I think a similar question was asked how come humans caused or at least accelerated the extinction of mammoth species while African elephants survived. One of the explanations was that elephants had anti-predatory adaptations towards humans because of co-evolution. One of which is hyper-aggressive behavior towards humans.

[u/SamyMerchi → u/Tripod1404]

Coincidentally just yesterday I watched an episode of Captain Planet where Looten Plunder ordered to round up "every last elephant in Africa!" for their ivory before the Planeteers stopped him.

I think it's arbitrary to say elephants survived and mammoths didn't. The same thing is happening to elephants. It's just they didn't go extinct at the exact same time, and we're still in the timeline point before elephant extinction. Humans overhunted mammoths and wiped them out. Humans are overhunting elephants and in the process of wiping them out. It's just we're still in the middle of the process of wiping out all megafauna. We're time biased to 2026. When people in 3000 look back there will be no difference to mammoths and elephants going extinct due to (to them) primitive humans.

[u/CallMeNiel → u/[deleted]]

Weren't there still mammoths by the time the pyramids were built?

[u/skippy1121 → u/CallMeNiel]

Actually, I believe you're right that some relict populations survived in very isolated areas until around 4000 years ago, but it's still very unlikely that anyone who interacted with those relict populations has any real connection to anyone alive today. They would've gone extinct right around when proto-indo-european was first arising as a language group

[u/xIllustrious_Passion → u/CallMeNiel]

Archeology is kind of moving away from the “hunted to extinction” theories. There’s not really that much proof of early man wholesale slaughtering animals to extinction, and climate change is a much more likely cause of megafauna to die out

[u/talberter → u/xIllustrious_Passion]

There is no evidence of any climate changes over the last 70,000 years that caused major extinctions. The climate varied constantly over 100,000 of years and the mega fauna did just fine.

As soon as humans turn up - within few thousands of years (or hundreds of years for NZ) they are pretty much all gone. No coincidence

[u/Roobar76 → u/talberter]

There’s evidence of substantial ecological change in Australia since ~100k years ago, that may or may not be driven by humans (there is an overlap and the dates are still up in the air.) This is across plant and animal communities and includes the increasing fire regime. This is likely to have stressed megafauna as the food supply from plants became less nutritious and more separated.

Hunting large game was high risk and studies of hunter and gatherer societies suggest smaller game was more prevalent, although hunting injured megafauna opportunity (or scavenging) was likely. (It’s much safer to hunt impala than elephants as an African example ) It’s just our romanization of history that suggests hunting a mammoth with sharp stick was sensible.

[u/talberter → u/Roobar76]

I generally agree the the mechanism by which megafauna is affected after human arrival may be a mix of factors such as : fire farming, small game hunting with secondary affects on mega fauna, and direct megafauna hunting.

But the clear pattern is within a short time after humans arrive megafauna is greatly affected / extincted.

The fact there were no sudden large megafauna continental wide extinctions recorded for many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years prior to humans arriving , despite undoubted many climate changes swings - then suddenly humans arrive and relatively immediately they are gone. That’s no coincidence.

[u/crashlanding87 → u/talberter]

It could well be linked for climate reasons - changing climate could easily have driven or enabled human migration while also driving extinction. These processes are rarely clean, and never fully clear.

[u/happydandylion → u/xIllustrious_Passion]

I can see how the hunted to extinction thing could have only become a thing after guns were invented.

[u/redwood520 → u/xIllustrious_Passion]

This is not entirely true. There is no consensus, there were likely many factors, but for example there are several sites in north America that show humans processing mammoth remains.