A new study suggests that the flightless birds named moa were completely extinct by the time New Zealand's human population had grown to two and half thousand people at most.
The new findings, which appear in the prestigious journal Nature Communications, incorporate results of research by international teams involved in two major projects led by Professor Richard Holdaway (Palaecol Research Ltd and University of Canterbury) and Mr Chris Jacomb (University of Otago), respectively.
The researchers calculate that the Polynesians whose activities caused moa extinction in little more than a century had amongst the lowest human population densities on record. They found that during the peak period of moa hunting, there were fewer than 1500 Polynesian settlers in New Zealand, or about 1 person per 100 square kilometres, one of the lowest population densities recorded for any pre-industrial society.
They found that the human population could have reached about 2500 by the time moa went extinct. For several decades before then moa would have been rare luxuries.
Estimates of the human population during the moa hunting period are more sensitive to how long it took to exterminate the birds through hunting and habitat destruction than to the size of the founding population.
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