{"id":132,"date":"2003-11-18T00:39:58","date_gmt":"2003-11-18T00:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=132"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:33:42","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:33:42","slug":"humans-exonerated-in-horse-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"humans exonerated in horse extinction?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Prehistoric Alaska once teemed with woolly  mammoths, large bison, and wild horses. Then, about 10,000 to 20,000  years ago, about 70 percent of North America&#8217;s large mammal population  mysteriously disappeared &#8212; including all the existing horse species.  (The Americas remained horseless until the Spaniards reintroduced the  animal in the 1500s.) The reasons behind this massive die-off remain  controversial &#8212; some researchers believe that humans hunted the animals  to extinction, others that climate changes led to their demise. R. Dale  Guthrie of the University of Alaska suspects that, for horses at least,  climate change may have been the culprit. He reports in the Nov. 13 <em> Nature<\/em> that before Alaskan horses went extinct, they shrank &#8212; their  bones upon the eve of their disappearance (about 12,500 years ago) were  up to 12 percent shorter than those of horses that lived 15,000 years  earlier. The fact that horses became smaller suggests to Guthrie that  environmental changes were at least partly to blame for their decline.  &#8220;The present data do not suggest human overkill,&#8221; he writes. <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 11\/18\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Prehistoric Alaska once teemed with woolly mammoths, large bison, and wild horses. Then, about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, about 70 percent of North America&#8217;s large mammal population mysteriously disappeared &#8212; including all the existing horse species. (The Americas remained &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=132\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1115,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/1115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}