Megafauna kill sites in South America: A critical review

Abstract

South America is the continent with the largest amount of megafauna extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene (∼50 genera), but the empirical evidence of megafauna exploitation by humans is little known by the international scientific community and often ignored from systematic reviews of global megafauna extinctions. Here, we systematically searched for archaeological records with human-megafauna interaction in South America, and then classified and described the megafauna kill sites (MKSs) by following three protocols with successively restricting criteria: Grayson and Meltzer (2015, 2002), Borrero (2009) and Mothé et al. (2020). We identified 134 studies presenting 69 archaeological sites with evidence of human-megafauna interactions over the late Quaternary of South America (from ∼17,000 cal yr BP to ∼7,900 cal yr BP), from which we classified up to 17 reliable MKSs with 15 exploited megafauna genera. Our results show that humans have exploited mastodons, giant ground sloths, giant armadillos, equids, bears, cervids and camelids for over 10,000 years, a much longer period than predicted by Paul Martin's overkill hypothesis. By synthesizing the complete evidence about human-megafauna interaction in an unnoticed continent, our database (available at www.killsitedatabase.com) fill an important gap from the international literature and will shed light on the analyses about the role of the human hunting activity on late Quaternary extinctions.