Newsademic British English edition 260

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The period between 1.8 million and 
11,700 years ago is called the Pleis­
tocene Epoch. In this epoch there 
were many large herbivores, or 
plant-eating animals, in most parts of 
the world. Nearly all died out at the 
end o f the Pleistocene. Yet some sur­
vived in Africa. There, elephants, gi­
raffes, rhinos, and hippos still exist.
In Africa, carnivores, or meat- 
eaters, do not prey upon these large 
animals. This is because they are
too big. They can also protect their 
young. In recent years the numbers 
o f elephants, giraffes, rhinos, and 
hippos have been declining. This is 
because o f human activity. From ob­
servations, it’s known that these large 
animals could destroy local environ­
ments, or ecosystems, if their num­
bers kept increasing. They would do 
this by eating all the vegetation.
Scientists 
have 
often 
won­
dered why this did not happen in 
the Pleistocene. Then, there were 
many more huge herbivores. They 
included woolly mammoths, which 
lived in northern parts o f North 
America, Europe and Russia. In 
Australia there were giant kanga­
roos, big platypuses, huge wombats 
and large koalas. Enormous sloths 
and armadillos lived in North and 
South America. There used to be 
giant elephant-like creatures, called 
gomphotheres. Together, these large 
animals are often called megafauna. 
Other examples are big birds, which 
could not fly, mastodons (another 
elephant-like animal) and large bea­
vers. Scientists know that all these 
big animals existed because they 
have found their fossilised bones.
Painting o f American Mastodon (Charles R Knight)
If there were so many big plant 
eaters in the Pleistocene, why did 
they not eat all the vegetation? By 
the end o f the Pleistocene, humans 
had moved to most parts o f the 
world. Yet, there were not many of 
them. It’s therefore unlikely that 
they controlled the number o f all

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