Overkill and the North American archaeological record—not guilty by association? A comment on Wolfe and Broughton (2020)

Abstract

The “associational critique” holds that there are too few archaeological kill/scavenging sites to support the hypothesis that human hunting caused the late Pleistocene extinction of 38 genera of primarily large mammals. Wolfe and Broughton (2020) assessed this critique on both theoretical and empirical grounds and found it wanting, with a focus on the arguments presented in Grayson and Meltzer (2015). We welcome their evaluation, including their effort to improve on our prior analyses. However, we are unconvinced by their assertion that hunters will always pursue large ungulates on encounter. We also reject their conclusion there is no systematic difference in the abundance of extant and extinct taxa in terminal Pleistocene archaeological contexts since they made two errors that undermine their analysis. First, they confounded calibrated and uncalibrated radiocarbon years. Second, they failed to note the parameters of the Cannon and Meltzer (2004) study on which their tally of archaeological kill/scavenging sites of extant taxa is based. With these mistakes corrected, the results confirm what we showed previously: extant large mammals occur in kill/scavenging sites far more often than extinct forms. This result also supports our previous suggestion that the now-extinct fauna had either already disappeared or was much reduced in abundance by the time people arrived on the landscape.