Land Bridge Migration

CowboyRobot writes "One 'advantage' of global warming is the increasing availability of fossil records fom the frozen north. For example, new evidence shows that many of the most common mammals in North America walked across the Bering land Bridge from Asia thousans of years ago. Reuters and Discovery Channel have other versions. (sorry, no pics)"

Advantage Number 2:

[Flingles]

Increasing heat directly translates to increasing bikinis.

Re:Advantage Number 2:

[JJ]

Maybe that should be advantage number three!!
Decreasing Size of bikinis.

Re:Advantage Number 2:

[Alanoman]

And if you increase the heat even more, eventually the number of bikinis will start to *decrease* due to combustion, or melting, or loose morals, or whatever.

Re:Theory proved out.

[bandy]

Peoples, not necessarily mammals. But given that we're mammals, yes, but only that far.

More study is also needed into what kinds of people [caucasian, asiatics, or ??] were amongst the immigrants and how many waves of immigration there were. Getting that data is a lot more dicey, but if we pay close attention to things as they de-ice, we could end up with a bonanza like the Ice Man [pbs.org] they found in the Alps a few years back.

b

[eugene ts wong]

b

Beavers

[gnixdep]

It would be interesting to see how beaver lodge building has evolved over the last 5 million years, if at all.

I think this could give us an unusal look into the evolution of complex behaviour.

new?

[gilmour14]

Didn't we learn about this in elementary school?

Re:Sure

[dmatos]

Nope. It was Hollywood Upstairs Medical Academy.

Facinating subject

[downix]

I know scientists have followed human migratory habits over the land bridge, primarily using artifacts like arrow heads or old campsites to track it, but animal migration I've never heard much of before. Very facinating to read.

Re:land bridge?

[dmatos]

"Land Bridge" sounds much cooler than "isthmus." It's also a bit easier to pronounce.

Not necessarily oxymora

[yerricde]

• A "land bridge" is a bridge made of land between two large land masses. It is another way to say "isthmus", using familiar English words.
• I'm guessing "shrimp" meant the crustacean before it meant "small."
• You can download OSS windows [winehq.org].

Let's go back

[utahjazz]

So, animals are not indiginous to the americas. I say we remove them all, restoring the land to it's natural state.

In fact, at some point, there were no plants either. I think we should just nuke the whole planet, restoring the natural enviornment.

We'll leave behind a note for any future life that emerges, asking them to do the same if they ever infect the earth.

Re:Let's go back

[Kethinov]

Insightful? More like funny! Whatever mod actually believs that we should evacuate America because it's not the continent our ancestors started on is crazy. By that logic, we shouldn't be in Europe or Asia either, seeing as how the human race evolved from Africa. Has anyone considered that maybe our desire to explore our planet is, in fact, natural?

you are completely missing the point

[penguin7of9]

So, animals are not indiginous to the americas. I say we remove them all, restoring the land to it's natural state.

Your cynicism is misplaced and betrays a lack of understanding. The motivation behind restoring ecosystems to their "natural state" is not to make them conform to some silly romantic ideals, it is a simple, practical motivation: when foreign species invade, the consequences are often diseases, pests, reduced productivity, and erosion. Restoring the ecosystem to its "natural" state, a state

and the Babel monument

[yerricde]

In the origin story from the book of Genesis, God confused the languages of the people because they stayed too close to Babylon after the flood, disregarding God's order to fill the earth. I'm guessing that the animal migrations may have piggybacked on the spreading of the peoples that started after they abandoned building the Babel monument. Young-earth creationists don't seem to have much against the concept of small-scale adaptation over generations, which could help explain how koalas picked up a taste