Abstract

In a recent JAS article (“A requiem for North American overkill”), Donald Grayson and David Meltzer [39] attack Paul Martin’s “overkill” hypothesis that humans caused America’s Terminal Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions. This is one of three similar recent articles by these authors [37–39] in which, by scrupulous evaluation of the archaeological record, they have reduced the list of unambiguous instances of human interactions with now-extinct mammals in North America to 14 proboscidean kill sites. We applaud their informed skepticism about the evidence, especially since one of us (Haynes) wrote a set of strict standards that Grayson and Meltzer used in their analyses. Regrettably, they did not exercise the same critical scrutiny and caution when they evaluated purported evidence of pre-Clovis occupation in South America [24,76]. Although their critical assessment of the Late Pleistocene archaeological record is laudable, Grayson and Meltzer unfortunately make numerous mistakes, indulge in unwarranted ad hominem rhetoric, and thus grossly misrepresent the overkill debate. In this comment, we first briefly address those aspects of their papers that represent mere theatrical posturing, and then we turn our attention to their more serious errors of fact and interpretation. First, the theater. A phrase repeated or paraphrased in each of the articles is that overkill is “a faith-based policy statement rather than a scientific statement about the past, an overkill credo rather than an overkill hypothesis” ([39], p. 591). By thus denying the very scientific legitimacy of the overkill hypothesis, Grayson and Meltzer seek to preclude any further serious engagement with its advocates. Science is not advanced by such dogmatic dismissal of competing hypotheses. Also theatrical but unfounded are three points Grayson and Meltzer [39] chose to emphasize in their article summary: (1) overkill has been rejected for western Europe (it has decidedly not been rejected by knowledgeable experts, such as A.J. Stuart [100] and colleagues [101]), (2) Paul Martin is the only reason overkill is still discussed for North America and Australia (also wrong—see, for example, the recent work of Alroy [6,7], Flannery [27–29], and O’Connell [85]), and (3) “there is virtually no evidence” to support overkill, which, as we show in this reply, is absolutely wrong. In fact, we think there is far more support for overkill than for climate change as the principal cause of the extinctions.

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