Genesis: 1:20: And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of sky." 1:22: God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth."
These passages were written at a time when world travel was unknown and no individual of that time could have had knowledge of the dispersion of life systems on the planet. Yet they describe the condition that the first true seafaring nations discovered when they ventured away from their ancestral fishing grounds. In the late 1400's and the beginning of the 1500's, the Portugeuse fishermen sailed to the northeast coast of North America and found the fish stocks so thick that their boats had trouble making headway through the schools. When they brought their catch of cod back to their home ports, the word soon spread and the cod fishery off the Atlantic coast of Canada became that day's version of the gold rush. By the 1800's the fishermen were annually hauling away up to 400,000 metric ton a year of cod fish. By the 1960's they were annually hauling away up to 2,000,000 ton of cod fish. An average cod fish weighs about five or six pound. So you can see that is a lot of fish taken over the five centuries. It was so much that eventually the cod fishery collapsed. You can get that information from here;
www.ncr.dfo.ca/zone/underwater_sous-marin/atlantic/acod_e.htm
It wasn't long after the discovery of the abundant cod that the new breed of trans-ocean fishermen discovered the Great Auk. It was in such abundant number that they were killed for their oil, to be used as fish bait, or simply for their feathers. They were a land dwelling, fish hunting penguin that were so numerous that the feather hunters simply grabbed hold of them and plucked them while they were still alive and left them to freeze to death, not even bothering to use their carcasses. The ones who were after the Auk's oil set up huge cauldrons among the Auk colonies and boiled them down there on the seashore, many time not even bothering to kill them before throwing them into the great pots over the rending fires. They went extinct in the middle of the 1800's. You can read about that here;
www.speciesatrisk.gc.ca/species/search/SearchDetail_e.cfm?SpeciesID=9
You can apply the same type of scenarios for a multitude of other species and find the same was true for them, whether they were seals, caribou, buffalo, or animals, fish and birds from all the continents and oceans. Animals proliferate exponentially and that is why species reach phenomenal populations. Humans are the same in that regard as all the other species, only humans are much more readily adapted to every environment in which they can survive because of their superior thinking ability. The only thing that caused the decline in populations of all of the aforementioned great populations of animals was the wanton destruction of the herds, flocks and schools for immediate profit.
There were no mitigating circumstances in history which kept humans from increasing their population numbers. Wars and disease took their toll, but they in no way ever brought the human population to a standstill. Human populations grew exponentially as is evidenced by the populations of India and China. China had half a billion people before the industrial revolution even began. So did India. Industrial revolution doesn't speed up population growth, it slows it down. All modern rich countries have lower birth rates than those of the poor nations. So if we want to slow the population explosion, we have to modernize all poor nations, not wrack them with war and disease, which is the current policy.
When I have been saying that there is a clear demarcation between the modern ecosystem and the one that crashed about thirty thousand year ago, that is not to imply that none of the members of any of those species didn't die before 30,000 year ago. It is saying that the ecosystem change happened in our recent past and that leaves no evolution time for our finer type of organisms to have evolved from the hardier type of organisms which went extinct. It would be unreasonable, and non-scientific to believe that all the stronger type of organisms would have perished and all the weaker type of organisms survived whatever catastrophe was responsible for the sudden extinction of so many species. Effectively, there was an ecosystem change from a hardy ecosystem to a more delicate ecosystem. To look at individual extinctions and try to explain them without looking at all the extinctions as a group occurrence would, again, be un-scientific.
