Climate change linked to Alaska horse extinction
Climate change linked to Alaska horse extinction
Submitted by Marie Gilbert
Phone: 907-474-7412
11/12/03
Where did all the horses go?
Climate change not hunting may be to blame for the extinction of horses in Alaska.
Human over hunting has been blamed for the extinction of native Alaska horses, but Dale Guthrie, Institute of Arctic Biology researcher, thinks changing climate and vegetation are the more likely culprits.
Guthrie, professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, used radiocarbon dating of fossils to document the decline and extinction of two Alaska Pleistocene horses.
"There is a hiatus of more than 500 radiocarbon years between the last dated Alaska horses and the earliest undisputed human artifacts, Guthrie wrote in a November 13 article in Nature. For over hunting to be a likely cause of extinction that theory must address the paradox of why super-able horse hunters were able to coexist with Alaska mammoths, which survived more than a millennium after horses, he wrote.
Climate change replaced the horses preferred food of the dry, cold Mammoth Steppe grasslands with wetter vegetation, Guthrie wrote. This change in vegetation and increasing competition from other large animals better suited to the new climate, Guthrie wrote, is perhaps the explanation for the Alaska horses’ declining body size and eventual extinction.
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