Abstract
Dozens of large mammals such as mammoth and mastodon disappeared in North America at the end of the Pleistocene with climate change and “overkill” by human hunters the most widely-argued causes. However, the population dynamics of humans and megafauna preceding extinctions have received little attention even though such information may be telling as we expect increasing human populations to be correlated with megafaunal declines if hunting caused extinctions. No such trends are expected if climate change was the primary cause. We present tests of these hypotheses here by using summed calibrated radiocarbon date distributions to reconstruct population levels of megafauna and humans. The results suggest that the causes for extinctions varied across taxa and by region. In three cases, extinctions appear linked to hunting, while in five others they are consistent with the ecological effects of climate change and in a final case, both hunting and climate change appear responsible.
Highlights
Dozens of large mammals such as mammoth and mastodon disappeared in North America at the end of the Pleistocene with climate change and “overkill” by human hunters the most widely-argued causes
Much effort has focused on the chronology of extinctions in relation to human arrival and changing climate[2,3,4,5,12,13,14,15,16,17,18], far less attention has focused on the population dynamics of humans and megafauna during the millennia preceding extinctions
We use the archeological radiocarbon record for the contiguous United States (US) derived from the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD)[58] for the period between 15.0 and 10.0 ka (n = 938 dates) and previously published direct dates on megafauna to model population trends
Summary
Dozens of large mammals such as mammoth and mastodon disappeared in North America at the end of the Pleistocene with climate change and “overkill” by human hunters the most widely-argued causes. Part of a broader, global wave of late Quaternary extinctions[2,3,4] and general biotic upheaval[5,6,7,8,9], the North American losses were among the most severe[1] The causes of these extinctions have been debated for centuries[10] with human hunting (i.e., “overkill”) and the ecological effects of climate change the most widely cited principal drivers[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11].
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