NY Times Gums Up Science
The New York Times, that bastion of unbiased science, managed to gum up more research last week with a yellow journalism article about paleo Indians on the California coast.
The blaring headline in the NYT read, “Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says”, but that is the opposite conclusion reached by the researchers.
Some excerpts from the NYT article:
Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says
By CORNELIA DEAN, NY Times, August 20, 2009 [here]
The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.
In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.
“Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben C. Rick of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. “Hunter-gatherers with fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine ecosystems” tens of thousands of years ago.
And, the researchers say, unless people understand how much coastal landscapes changed even before the advent of modern coastal development, efforts to preserve or restore important habitats may fail.
Dr. Rick’s co-author, Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon, said people who lived on the Channel Islands as much as 13,000 years ago left behind piles of shells and bones, called middens, that offer clues to how they altered their landscape.
“We have shell middens that are full of sea urchins,” Dr. Erlandson said. He said he and Dr. Rick theorized that the sea urchins became abundant when hunting depleted the sea otters that prey on them. In turn, the sea urchins would have severely damaged the underwater forests of kelp on which they fed.
“These effects cascade down the ecosystem,” Dr. Erlandson said.
Today, coastal scientists argue about a similar cascade, which some attribute to sea otters’ being eaten by killer whales.
Two papers by Rick and Erlandson are posted at W.I.S.E. in the History of Western landscapes Colloquium [here, here].
The paper that discusses shellfish is:
Erlandson, Jon M., Torben C. Rick, Michael Graham, James Estes, Todd Braje, and René Vellanoweth. 2005. Sea otters, shellfish, and humans: 10,000 years of ecological interaction on San Miguel Island, California. Proceedings of the Sixth California Islands Symposium, edited by D.K. Garcelon and C.A. Schwemm, pp. 58-69. Arcata: Institute for Wildlife Studies and National Park Service.
Abstract
We use data from San Miguel Island shell middens spanning much of the past 10,000 years in a preliminary exploration of long-term ecological relationships between humans, sea otters (Enhydra lutris), shellfish, and kelp forests. At Daisy Cave, human use of marine habitats begins almost 11,500 years ago, with the earliest evidence for shellfish harvesting (11,500 cal BP), intensive kelp bed fishing (ca. 10,000-8500 cal BP), and Sea Otter hunting (ca. 8900 cal BP) from the Pacific Coast of North America. On San Miguel Island, Native Americans appear to have coexisted with sea otters and productive shellfish populations for over 9,000 years, but the emphasis of shellfish harvesting changed over time. Knowledge of modern sea otter behavior and ecology suggests that shell middens dominated by large red abalone shells–relatively common on San Miguel between about 7,300 and 3,300 years ago–are only likely to have formed in areas where sea otter populations had been reduced by Native hunting or other causes. Preliminary analysis of sea urchin lenses, in which the remains of urchins are unusually abundant, may also signal an increasing impact of Island Chumash populations on kelp forest and other near shore habitats during the late Holocene. Such impacts were probably relatively limited, however, when compared to the rapid and severe disruption caused by commercial exploitation under the Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes of historic times.
Note that the abstract says, “Native Americans appear to have coexisted with sea otters and productive shellfish populations for over 9,000 years” and “Such impacts were probably relatively limited, however, when compared to the rapid and severe disruption caused by commercial exploitation under the Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes of historic times.”
That is not the same as “Ancient Man Hurt Coasts”; in fact, it’s the opposite.
The Chumash people harvested shellfish and sea otters for 9,000 years without decimating any populations. It wasn’t until modern fur hunters extirpated sea otters that large declines occurred in that population. In any case, the kelp beds have been extant continuously along the Pacific Coast of North America during the entire Holocene, with or without otters, urchins, and killer whales.
The NY Times doesn’t stop there. They sound the global warming alarm:
Sea levels are on the rise today, fueled by global warming, and Dr. Rick said anthropologists were rushing to excavate the most threatened coastal sites.
As a matter of fact, sea levels are not “on the rise”. Sea levels rose rapidly about 50 meters when the continental ice sheets melted at the end of the Wisconsin Glaciation some 14,000 years ago. Sea levels continued to rise (another 50 meters) until about 7,000 years ago, by which time most of the ice sheet meltwater had drained to the oceans. Since then sea levels have been rising about 2mm (millimeters) per year [here]. That is up until about 2005, when the rate of rise decreased [here] to about 1mm per year.
That’s right, sports fans. Instead of sea levels on the rise due to global warming, rushing up from the shoreline and drowning Florida and Manhattan, sea levels are stabilizing!
Whodda thunk it!!!!
Not the NYT, which is an alarmist yellow journalism rag, a dead tree pulp purveyor with an enormous carbon footprint. The NYT circulation is 1,000,665 newspapers daily and 1,438,585 on Sunday, according to the Wikipedia [here]. The average issue weighs at least a pound, two on Sundays, which means that they process and ship 10 million pounds of chemically-treated tree pulp every week, in trucks, trains, and airplanes burning fossil fuels.
Please, spare me the handwringing over global warming from the NY Times!!!!
And spare us all the finger of blame and doom from urban cowboys in the most environmentally destroyed township in the world.
Tweaky vegan New Yorkers have called for a boycott of Idaho potatoes because they don’t like predator management [here]. I have a better idea: boycott the NY Times. Halt your subscription; save the planet. They are about to go belly up, anyway, with bankruptcy looming far sooner than the flood waters of the rising Atlantic Ocean. It is time for a mercy killing, for the sake of all sentient lifeforms, and the sacrificial lamb should be the New York Times.
