Creationism in Crisis - A Mass Extinction in Southern California, 7000 Years Before Creationists Think Earth Was Created!

A mural in the Page Museum depicts hundreds of species whose fossils have been found in the La Brea Tar Pits.

Credit: Mark Hallett.

Illustration depicting the hunting behavior of La Brea carnivores, including saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, and coyotes.

Credit: Mauricio Antón

Scientists Zero In On Timing, Causes Of Ice Age Mammal Extinctions In Southern California - Texas A&M Today

It’s hardly surprising anymore because all but the most recent history of Earth took place millions, even billions of years before Earth was created, according to Creationists’ literal reading of the Bronze Age creation myth recorded in the Bible, but here we have evidence of a sudden mass extinction in Southern California, not by a genocidal global flood, but by rapid climate change, human activity and devastating regional fires.

This is the conclusion of a detailed study by a team of scientists that included Texas A&M University archaeologist, Dr. Michael Waters. The team focused on the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits.

First a little AI information about the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits:

The Rancho La Brea Tar Pits

The Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, also known as the La Brea Tar Pits, is a famous fossil excavation site located in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles, California, USA. It is one of the most significant paleontological sites in the world and has provided an incredible wealth of information about the prehistoric life that existed in the region during the Pleistocene epoch. Here are some key points about the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits:

1. Formation: The tar pits were formed as a result of crude oil seeping to the surface from underground deposits. The oil would bubble up to the surface, forming pools of sticky asphalt or tar. These pools were often covered by water, leaves, and other debris, which attracted animals that became trapped in the tar.
2. Fossil Preservation: The unique conditions of the tar pits resulted in excellent preservation of the trapped animals. The tar's stickiness trapped animals, and the lack of oxygen and bacteria in the tar slowed down decomposition. Over time, bones and other remains of animals accumulated in the pits.
3. Prehistoric Fauna: The tar pits contain a wide variety of fossils, including those of mammals, birds, reptiles, and plants. Some of the most common animals found in the pits include dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, and various species of birds.
4. Research and Discoveries: Excavations at the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits began in the early 20th century. The first scientific excavations took place in the early 1900s, and since then, thousands of fossils have been recovered. These fossils have provided invaluable insights into the animals that lived in the Los Angeles area during the Pleistocene epoch, which occurred approximately 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.
5. Page Museum: The George C. Page Museum, now known as the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, was established in 1977 near the tar pits. It houses a vast collection of fossils and artifacts recovered from the site. The museum also includes exhibits that provide information about the history of the tar pits, the animals that were trapped there, and the science of paleontology.
6. Active Excavations: Despite decades of research and excavation, the tar pits are still actively studied and excavated. New discoveries continue to shed light on the ancient ecosystem of the region.
7. Public Engagement: The La Brea Tar Pits and Museum offers educational programs, guided tours, and interactive exhibits for visitors of all ages. It's a popular destination for tourists, students, and researchers interested in paleontology and natural history.

The Rancho La Brea Tar Pits are a unique and invaluable resource for understanding the ancient history of Southern California and the diverse range of life that once inhabited the region. The site's ongoing excavations and research contribute to our understanding of prehistoric ecosystems and the interactions between humans and the environment during that time.

ChatGPT3.5 "Tell me all about the Rancho La Brea tarpit" [Response to user request]
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The work of the scientists is explained in a news release from Texas A&M:

Re-created animals in pond outside George C. Page Museum, La Brea Discoveries in Los Angeles

Getty images

The end of the last Ice Age also marked the end for more than three dozen genera of large mammals in North America, from mammoths and mastodons to bison and saber-toothed cats. Details concerning the precise timing and circumstances, however, have remained murky ever since.

A team of scientists that included Texas A&M University archaeologist Dr. Michael Waters recently focused on the well-known Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in southern California in their quest to provide answers to these questions, resulting in the most exact and detailed timeline for the extinctions that happened during the latter part of the Pleistocene period in North America, along with some foreboding insight into the area’s present and future. Their work is featured on the cover of the current issue of Science.

Waters, a distinguished professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans (CSFA), along with roughly a dozen fellow researchers examined the timing and cause of the extinction of a variety of large mammals, known as megafauna, that got stuck in tar at Rancho La Brea, ensuring the preservation of their bones. The team used the radiocarbon dating method to date 169 bones from seven different animals — bison, horse, camel and ground sloths as well as the carnivores that ate them, including the saber-toothed cat, dire wolf and American lion. They also compared those findings to regional pollen and charcoal records along with continent-wide data on human and large mammal populations.

Armed with their new data, the researchers subsequently used time-series modeling to produce the most detailed chronobiology to date, showing the relationships between climate and vegetation change, fire activity, human demographics and megafauna extinctions — groundbreaking results they report in the Aug. 18 edition of the world-leading academic journal.

Waters says the team’s findings reveal that Ice Age mammal populations in southern California were steady from 15,000 to around 13,250 years ago. Afterward, there was a sharp decline in the population of the seven animals studied, and they all became extinct between 13,070 to 12,900 years ago.

In an interesting modern-day parallel, this extinction event corresponds with a change in the environment from 13,300 to 12,900 years ago marked by warming and drying that made the land more vulnerable to fires in southern California. Charcoal records show that fires increased around 13,500 years ago and peaked between 13,200 and 12,900 years ago. Studies show that humans arrived in North America’s Pacific coast 16,000 to 15,000 years ago and lived alongside the megafauna for 2,000 to 3,000 years before their extinction.

Fire is a way that small numbers of humans can have a large impact over a broad area. This study has implications for the changes we see in southern California today. The temperatures are rising, and the area is drying. We also see a dramatic increase in fires. It appears that history may be repeating itself.

Mammoths and mastodons survived in many parts of North America until around 12,700 years ago. These animals were hunted by the Clovis people between about 13,000 and 12,700 years ago. We are now dating megafauna remains from other locations to give a broader understanding of the Rancho La Brea research in the context of North America.

Michael R. Waters. Center for the Study of the First Americans
Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, TX, USA.

While humans hunted animals during this period, Waters says the impact of hunting on the demise of the megafauna likely was minor because of the low population of humans on the landscape. However, the fires would have been devastating, resulting in the loss of habitat causing the rapid decline and extinction of the megafauna in southern California. The study suggests these fires were ignited by humans, which had increased in number by that time.

While Waters acknowledges that this is the story of extinction at Rancho La Brea, he says it has the potential to offer insights into when extinctions happened across all of North America.

The museum at La Brea Tar Pits holds the world’s largest collection of fossils from the Ice Age and has been central to the study of animal and plant life at the end of the Pleistocene epoch for more than a century. Its naturally occurring asphalt pools entrapped and preserved the bones of thousands of individual animals representing dozens of megafaunal species during the last 60,000 years, enabling scientists to determine when different species disappeared from the ecosystem and why.

The sequence of events is shown by the following illustrations. As can be seen, the sudden changes were precipitated by the sort of climate change now facing the world, and the wild-fires now devastating large areas. This sequence was so rapid that no specialised species could possibly adapt in time to avoid extinction.

Sequence of ecological events as recorded at Rancho La Brea, California.
Top left: conditions around the tar pits were moist and cool, with abundant trees and megafaunal mammals. Bottom left: the onset of postglacial warming and drying begins as human pressure on herbivores increases. Top right: the synergy between climatic and human impacts enables a sudden ecological state transition characterized by unprecedented fire activity. Bottom right: a chapparal ecosystem is established; megafauna are extinct, and only coyote entrapment continues at the tar pits.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. TOWNSEND, COURTESY OF THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY

F. Robin O’Keefe et al.(2023)

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Fig. 5. Correlation among Southern California ecosystem variables.
(A) Summed probability distribution of human occupation in North America derived from the CARD database (black line). Blue bars present archaeological data including age range for Clovis, earliest evidence of human occupation along the Pacific Coast, “AS” is the date of Arlington Springs Man, and earliest evidence of human occupation west of the Rocky Mountains [see materials and methods (11)]. (B) The fire record at Lake Elsinore as recorded by particles of charcoal per square centimeter per year; series is a 200-year running mean. (C) PC1 scores for ecosystem variables through time. Red regression lines are four regimes identified by breakpoint analysis [see section 4 of the supplementary materials (11)]: the drying transition out of the HS-1 and initial human arrival; relative stability for much of the Bølling-Allerød while humans were scarce (“Megafaunal Woodland”); an abrupt state shift from 13.3 to 13.0 ka (“State Shift”); and the establishment of a new regime (“Chaparral”).

F. Robin O’Keefe et al.(2023)

Again, as with previous studies I've written about recently in this blog, the facts are completely irreconcilable with the simplistic tales in the Bible. No wonder increasing numbers of theologians are abandoning creationism and explaining away the counter-factual tales in the Bible as metaphorical and/or allegorical, although the jury still seems to be debating what they are allegories/metaphors for, exactly.

This contrasts markedly with the Theory of evolution by Natural Selection, which is confirmed repeatedly with almost every piece of biomedical science. No wonder membership of the creation cult is falling, as even intellectually dishonest creationists find it increasingly difficult to rationalise such obviously counter-factual beliefs.

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