Overkill, glacial history, and the extinction of North America's Ice Age megafauna.

ABSTRACT: The end of the Pleistocene in North America saw the extinction of 38 genera of mostly large mammals. As their disappearance seemingly coincided with the arrival of people in the Americas, their extinction is often attributed to human overkill, notwithstanding a dearth of archaeological evidence of human predation. Moreover, this period saw the extinction of other species, along with significant changes in many surviving taxa, suggesting a broader cause, notably, the ecological upheaval that occurred as Earth shifted from a glacial to an interglacial climate. But, overkill advocates ask, if extinctions were due to climate changes, why did these large mammals survive previous glacial-interglacial transitions, only to vanish at the one when human hunters were present? This question rests on t

SUBMITTER: Meltzer DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7682371 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature