Rather they were robust, healthy populations when humans encountered and terminated them.” says Trevor Worthy, an evolutionary biologist and Moa expert at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. “The inescapable conclusion is these birds were not in the old age of their lineage and about to exit from the world. The Moas present us a particularly important insight because they were the last of the giant species to vanish, and they did so recently, when a changing climate was not a factor. When the Maori hunted these birds to extinction in the first half of the 1400s, barely a century after their arrival, there was no prey large enough left to sustain the Haast’s Eagles that hunted the Moas for food, so the Haast Eagles also became extinct soon afterwards. Recent research strongly suggests that the events leading to extinction took less than 100 years. The native species were not equipped to cope with human predators. Moa extinction occurred between 12, primarily due to overhunting by the Māori. A new genetic study of Moa fossils points to humankind as the sole perpetrator of the birds’ extinction. Their die-off coincided with the arrival of the first modern humans on the islands, the Maori. It is estimated that the ancestors of the Moa existing in Aotearoa when the Maori arrived had been living there for nearly six million years.Ībout 600 years ago theses large birds became extinct. The Māori arrived in Aotearoa in several waves of canoe voyages. It is believed the Māori came from islands in Polynesia in the South Pacific Ocean. The Māori were the first inhabitants of Aotearoa. It is estimated that, when Maori settled Aotearoa circa 1280, the Moa population was about 58,000. When the Maori first arrived they called the islands Aotearoa, meaning ‘Land of the Long White Cloud’. 3,300-year-old mummified remains of an upland Moa claw
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