Why the Great Auk Is Gone for Good

Overhunting by greedy European explorers may very well have been the cause for the extinction of the great auk, especially as a source for cheap fuel and food. But this overhunting myth has been put to rest with the Wooly Mammoth and other megafauna from the ice age thanks to decades of bold investigative reporting by Randall Carlson and from the resulting research in Graham Hancock’s new book America Before. We were struck by large pieces of a comet some 11,800 years ago, which brought lightning raining down from a coronal mass ejection as it crossed the sun, and massive, biblical flooding as the great glaciers over northern Europe and North America began to collapse in stages from the impacts (the largest creating the Hudson Bay) ...and sea level rose more than 400 ft over the next few thousand years from what modern humans had never seen before. The last remnants of what were once living mammoths were found on Sakhalin Island, between Russia and Alaska, dating back to the year 4000BC. In a quirk of nature, Siberia wasn’t covered in glaciers as much as Europe and North America during the ice age. One possibility is that the North Pole used to reside in Canada before the Younger Dryas impact tilted the Earth’s axis. During the 1830’s thawing of permafrost in Siberia revealed thousands of mammoth tusks, some with broken legs from ice flows. Humans couldn’t have done this and wouldn’t if we could. We... along with auks... barely survived the Younger Dryas impact ourselves.

Any possibility they might be brought back? This is a horrible story. Very sad.

Humans are really are like a dangerous disease on the planet.

The fate of the Great Auk sounds similar to the Dodo Bird, the latter a trusting one, clobbered by British sailors on arrival for sport and eaten by dogs and feral pigs. The last Dodo died in Mauritius circa 1863, and the extinction of this bird is now recognized as a tragedy. Sir John Tenniel illustrated a Dodo bird for Lewis Carroll's Alice, seen presenting her with a gold ring, and the Great Auk looks similar to an Edward Gorey's penguin, which he entitled 'The Dubious Guest'. It gives new meaning to the words 'Tarred and Feathered', and is a great shame.

Unfortunately, that is what man is best of doing...destruction of animal and plant life for no viable reason.

None of this is new - humans being the cause of the extinction of the Great Auk was laid out in great detail in Elizabeth Kolbert's marvellous 2014 book 'The Sixth Extinction', which describes many more examples of how humanity, whether wittingly or unwittingly, has caused or is causing the destruction of Earth's biodiversity.

Flanders and Swann: "The brontosaurus had a brain no bigger than a crisp. The dodo had a stammer, and the mammoth had a lisp. The auk was just too awkward; now, there's none of them alive. Each one, like Man, had shown itself unfitted to survive. Their story points a moral; now it's we who wear the pants: The extinction of these species holds a lesson for us ANTS."

"In 1844, members of a small expedition found two of the birds on an Icelandic island, strangled them and crushed their only egg." I simply don't understand some humans' need to destroy anything they see. Is it the same petulance that drives children to knock over sandcastles? My guess would be it comes from a deep-seeded inner insecurity, but that begs the question why this affliction dominates the thought of some humans but not others.

To call us humans destructive stewards suggests we feel some sense of responsibility over other creatures and the planet. And while there are many responsible and enlightened individuals; as a species we have proven to be nothing but dangerous rapacious predators whose behavior can be likened to an uncurable cancer infecting and destroying the planet as it spreads.

Yet another reasons why I am so sorry to belong to a murderous species falsely named, homo 'sapiens.'

Humans = Greed once I saw this just nodded yep end of article

As a note, few extinctions, at least so far, are due to climate change. More people. Less of everything else. That's the way it is.

"In the past, researchers have speculated that environmental change topped off by human greed took down the great auk. After all, that’s what people think happened to woolly mammoths." The article garbles and oversimplifies "what people think". As the linked article explains: "[Pennsylvania State researchers] ruled out all the leading candidates, including human predation, polar bears, increased winter snowpack, volcanic activity and changing vegetation. The real reason, they concluded, after examining lake bed sediments, was simply a lack of fresh water." "[Swedish researchers suggested] that the lesser [genetic] fitness of the Wrangel mammoths might have contributed to their extinction."

The article draws a distinction between the great auk and woolly mammoths. In fact, there is mounting evidence that humans are largely responsible for the extinction of woolly mammoths. They had survived previous glacials and interglacials.

"But new research points the finger more squarely at us." The researchers never refer to "us". No one now alive can be blamed for the extinction of the bird. That accusatory wording should be in the opinion section, not the science section. The right word would have been "humans", which are a species: "But new research suggests that the extinction was the consequence of intensive hunting by humans." That wording is derived from the abstract, which uses the phrase "intensive human hunting".

“In the past, researchers have speculated that environmental change topped off by human greed took down the great auk. After all, that’s what people think happened to woolly mammoths.” While species can survive environmental change, they cannot survive the greed and insanity of humans.

Whatever we humans touch seems to turn to ash. Depressing.

"In 1844, members of a small expedition found two of the birds on an Icelandic island, strangled them and crushed their only egg." My God, how savage.

Serious question - can we clone them back? or go like the Quaga project and bring them back by selective breeding? Would love to get to see a live one in my time. That and a Dodo, would love to have a pet Dodo. I think science could do that, except they keep spending their money in artificial marihuana instead.

@Stephen I think the cockroaches are doing well too.

"What caused such a precipitous decline? In the past, researchers have speculated that environmental change topped off by human greed took down the great auk. After all, that’s what people think happened to woolly mammoths." I don't understand why everybody wants the human race to avoid responsibility for the disappearance of mega-fauna and the Neanderthals, to name a few. Of course modern humans wiped them all out. There was no record-keeping and no rules to follow; modern humans simply acted in their own, immediate interests. And you would have thought that we learned our lesson, but twelve thousand years after agriculture liberated us from our need to hunt/gather, we are wiping out animals at an even greater rate for "Traditional Eastern Medicine" (quackery).

As soon as the humans go extinct, the earth will heal itself. This is going to happen much sooner than people imagine. There may be a few small populations of humans left but without the medical intervention that exists now, their lives will be brutal and short.