A new study has uncovered the likely cause behind the mysterious disappearance of dwarf hippos and elephants that once roamed the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Researchers have concluded that paleolithic humans, arriving on the island around 14,000 years ago, were responsible for driving these unique species to extinction in less than a millennium.
Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University, Australia, led the research which challenges previous assumptions that a small prehistoric human population couldn’t have caused such rapid extinctions.
Speaking to Newsweek, Bradshaw said that previous claims dismissing human involvement in the extinctions were due to several factors, including poor-quality archaeological specimens, outright denial of human presence on the island, and the persistence of the “noble savage” myth, which leads people to mistakenly believe that non-industrialized societies couldn’t significantly impact the environment.
Remains of dwarf elephants displayed at the Akamas Geology and Paleontology Information Center in Pano Arodes, western Cyprus. These creatures weighed 12 times less than male African elephants we know today.
CJA Bradshaw/Flinders University
“They want to blame it on something beyond human control, like climate change,” he said.
Cyprus, an island in the eastern Mediterranean Sea that today has a population of more than 1 million people, sits about 40 miles south of Turkey and 60 miles west of Syria. It is the third largest Mediterranean island—140 miles from east to west and at most 60 miles north to south.
During the Late Pleistocene, an epoch lasting from around 130,000 to 12,000 years ago, Cyprus was home to only two species of megafauna: the dwarf elephant, weighing around 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds), and the dwarf hippo, weighing approximately 130 kilograms (285 pounds).
By comparison, modern male African elephants can weigh more than 6,000 kilograms (13,280 pounds), while male hippos typically reach around 3,000 kilograms (6,640 pounds).
Both dwarf species vanished shortly after human arrival, leaving scientists to question the cause of their demise.
The research team combined data from various disciplines, including paleontology and archaeology, to create models of what could have happened. These models accounted for human energy demand, diet composition, prey selection and hunting efficiency.
“We took hippos and elephants out of their respective populations as a function of how many people were in Cyprus at the time, how efficient they were at hunting, how much effort it took to process the meat and how much food they needed to consume,” Bradshaw said.
“When the off-take was greater than the animals’ replacement rates, they quickly go extinct.”
The results suggest that a population of 3,000–7,000 hunter-gatherers in Cyprus could have been responsible for driving both dwarf species to extinction.
“The main determinant of extinction risk for both species was the proportion of edible meat they provided to the first people on the island,” Bradshaw said in a statement. The study’s predictions aligned with the chronological sequence of megafauna extinctions found in paleontological records, adding weight to the findings.
Cyprus was the perfect “lab” for this work to be carried out in. “Because Cyprus is a small, reasonably spatially homogenous environment, has only two megafauna species and not a lot else to eat easily, it is the perfect test case for how small populations can hunt enough animals to extinction in a short time frame,” Bradshaw explained.
The study provides evidence that even small human populations with limited technology can have significant impacts on native ecosystems. Similar questions of human versus environmental impacts on extinction still linger over many ancient species, including the famous woolly mammoth.
Yet despite the success of the team’s method on Cyprus, Bradshaw remains skeptical about its applicability to other mysteries of megafauna extinction.
“It’s difficult to apply the same methods elsewhere because most regions are too spatially variable, they have quite a large diversity of potential pretty complicating things, and extinction and arrival chronologies are poorly resolved,” he said.
“But, the more we examine, the more we conclude that humans were probably the primary drivers in most places, with climate change exacerbating the additional mortality in some cases.”
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References
Bradshaw, C. J. A., Saltré, F., Crabtree, S. A., Reepmeyer, C., & Moutsiou, T. (2024). Small populations of palaeolithic humans in Cyprus hunted endemic megafauna to extinction. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 291. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.0967
