Human populations were growing rapidly and simultaneously the period from 50000-10000 was the end of the last ice age
So the going theory is that the original areas of climate for which mega fauna were most populous, was effectively reduced increasingly over time as a result of warming, which humans were able to capitalize on to the point where we kind of “finished the job.”
This is effectively, how we see extinction patterns around the globe. Whereas humans aren’t necessarily the primary or only cause, but they do make a big enough exogenous impact to cause a collapse.
"What’s most shocking is how few humans were responsible for this large-scale destruction of wildlife. There were likely fewer than 5 million people in the world. Around half the population of London today."
Last mammoths died 4000 years ago, and they might have even lived longer, if short-term events hadn’t tainted their water and drained their food supply.
It wasn't climate change that killed off the mammoths; it was humans.
https://www.google.com/search?q=mammoth+house&tbm=isch
We ate them all. It was only when there were no big animals left to hunt that we invented agriculture.
No, it was climate change.
The last, small population of mammoths that survived until 4000 years ago on Wrangel Island never came in contact with humans. They died because they were ill suited for the climate they lived in.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7548514
> One million years ago, elephants and their cousins roamed the five major continents of the earth. Then humans came along. Today elephants can be found only in portions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
> The two most argued hypotheses for their decline are climatic changes and over-hunting by humans. A recent archaeological expedition dug up information that may support the latter.
> Exploring 41 sites ranging from 1.8 million to 10,000 years old, Todd Surovell of the University of Wyoming found that interactions between humans and elephants matched up with successive waves of human population expansion. As the human populations in those sites continued to grow, the number of elephants shrank and, in some sites, disappeared.
Who knows why? Larger size, slower reproductive rates, and adaptations to colder climates? Maybe elephants were more socially organized and were harder to hunt? Maybe their habitats were not so densely populated by humans? We can only speculate.
> No, it was climate change.
While climate change certainly played a role, it's undeniable that the QME would not have been as extensive if it weren't for human involvement.
> never came in contact with humans
That's not clear, iirc.