My snippet world is taking on a life of its own in my mind.
More detail is sticking.
The world through the spook-hole (® WF Fleetwood 2020) has mega-fauna.
The real reason is because I want it to be there. I'm the world-builder and have God-like powers over it.
But I want a plausible explanation that's not pure double-talk and handwavium.
I think I stumbled across it.
This world also lacked homo-sapiens until the Sioux opened their gate and escaped the reservations.
It did have homo-neanderthalensis.
One of the holocene extinction theories is that as the climate warmed, the mega-fauna was having trouble adapting to the new conditions and we humans wandered in and knocked them over the edge by hunting them.
I'm deciding that homo-neanderthalensis was having the same problems adapting to the heat as the big critters and it took them longer to spread out into the rest of the world, thus giving the giant mammals time to adapt and then continue to thrive.
It's not complete double-talk. It's better than a lot of fantasy world explanations, in fact.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGKXfFpdl3c This one first
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sN0JLSQiAw This one next
Watch these two episodes (they are kind of long, jump forward a few times to get the gist).
I don't know if you've read Harry Turtledove's A Different Flesh, but it's set in a world where the Americas were cut off after homo habilus got there but before homo sapiens could...until 1492. So the European explorers find a world where the Pleistocene climax fauna are still very much alive, and "sims" (homo habilus) are trainable as servants.
ReplyDeleteI'm not familiar with that one.
DeleteThough H.Habilus was extinct before Beringia was open.
DeleteMegafauna seems to be the norm on Earth, rather than the exception, barring the tiny snippet of history in which we exist. Dinosaurs had the run of the place and were enormous for ages, post-dinosaurs stuff resumed being big pretty quickly. The combination of some geological weirdness and humans filling a selection pressure void that normally led to megafauna seems to be what happened, so I'd say your estimate that less successful humanity would mean more megafauna works pretty well as a reason.
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