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Comment by amatic | Hacker News Reader

Could you share some references, like a recent review or consensus? I've seen different takes on the causes of megafauna extinction, and one story is that the extinction lines up pretty well with the arrival of humans to North America. But recent evidence seems to put the arrival of humans to a few thousand years before the Younger Dryas?

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We know there were modern humans in North America 22,000+ years ago. So did hunters go along fine for 9000 years with no impact, and then suddenly, at one stroke, wipe out everything they depended on? It never made any sense even before we knew about the comet strike or earlier arrival. We had lions in Europe right up until the Roman circuses, and still have them and elephants in Africa, and tigers and elephants in India.

There is a good survey article on the status of the end-Pleistocene comet strike by Martin Sweatman. Follow references from there to Antarctic ice cores. (Boslough and Holliday have a great deal to be ashamed of.)

It’s about likelihood.

There are all sorts of things that can influence consumption patterns. Change in climate could result in fewer sources of food as drought or inclement stunted certain crops which cascaded into fewer food sources for upstream predators where at the apex we had our fore-bearers who may had decimated populations till there were not enough to sustain the species.

About likelihood, what are the odds that the biggest bear in North America was Clovis peoples' favorite game animal?

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