It's not the climate: scientists have identified the cause of the death of giant kangaroos in Australia

Scientists have discovered the cause of the death of giant kangaroos in Australia 40,000 years ago. In their opinion, it was not so much due to climate change as to the activities of human hunters.

90 percent of Australia's large animals went extinct between 65,000 and 40,000 years ago. Most of them were kangaroos. The main suspects in this extinction were considered to be human hunters, who appeared somewhere between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, as well as rapid climate change, which may have drastically reduced the diet of animals, ScienceNews writes.

However, paleontologist Samuel Arman of the Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery in Alice Springs, Australia, and his colleagues believed that the climate was not to blame, at least not when it came to kangaroos. After all, these animals have experienced dramatic climate change before.

Australian kangaroos emerged between 20 and 15 million years ago, when the continent was covered by dense rainforest. By 5 million years ago, the island had dried up, but kangaroos thrived, evolving into new species and occupying numerous ecological niches that spanned a wide range of diets.

To evaluate the possible role of dietary restrictions, Armand and his colleagues analyzed the teeth of 937 kangaroos, both fossilized and modern, studying tiny signs of wear and tear that indicate what these animals ate. This dental analysis confirmed that ancient kangaroos were generalists who ate a variety of foods that would have helped them survive in a changing climate. This, according to the researchers, points to the human hunter as the most likely culprit in the death of the animals.

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