Word: alroy
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...when John Alroy, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, put the question of what happened to the megafauna to a computer model, he got back a surprising answer. As he reported in the journal Science last week, the overkill hypothesis is actually quite plausible. That's because it was not necessary for human hunters to do in every last animal. All people had to do was kill slightly more animals than were born, a process that Alroy's model suggests could easily have taken place over a span of 1,000 years. Ecological upheavals owing...
...first of the two new studies, John Alroy of the University of California, Santa Barbara, used a computer simulation to determine whether overkilling by human was a conceivable cause of the wave of extinction, which occurred about 1200 years after humans are believed to have arrived in North America 13,400 years ago. The simulation took into account factors ranging from population density to hunting ability, and was able to correctly predict the extinction of 32 out of the 41 species studied...
...studies have their detractors. Some scientists cite the lack of archeological evidence as one of many problems with Alroy's study, and Ayliffe says it is unlikely that hunting was the sole cause of the Australian extinction. She suggests that the human use of fire, combined with hunting, may have been too much for the species to bear...
...works is purely autobiographical, but he seems to have come closer than almost any other writer to basing all specifics in his work on personal experience. Morgan shows that many of Maugham's works consist almost entirely of events or characters lifted directly from his life: like his character Alroy Kear, for example, based on Hugh Walpole, Maugham's friend until the publication of Cakes and Ale--so thinly disguised, as well as unflattering, that those involved sued Maugham for libel...
...live in the unfashionable section of London and take the streetcar, instead of a taxi, to attend the smart dinner parties to which he was invited. In that young man he finds shades of the self-serving social climber Maugham wrote about when he depicted Hugh Walpole as Alroy Kear in Cakes...