Specifically one Clovis infant, this has some responses https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/an-ice-age-infants...
A population that is protein-starved will be in real trouble, no matter how plentiful everything else is. I think it makes perfect sense to give special attention to the protein source, even if it's also a major energy supplier with the fat that comes along.
But of course it's well possible that the focus on protein is mostly coincidental, as described in GP's excellent post, and not so much motivated by substitutability. But I'd argue that it's a convenient coincidence.
It always seemed like a false choice to me. It's not like humans need to literally hunt a species to extinction to wipe it out. We can (and have) done it by disrupting the food chain, altering environments and introducing invasive species as well.
The push back against ancient humans causing or at least, significantly contributing to extinctions feels odd. Few would argue that human activity, even absent hunting or advanced technology, can threaten species today, but for some reason it's considered impossible for ancient peoples.
Additionally, during the same time period megafauna in Africa have (well, until recently) continued to thrive despite the presence of humans and earlier hominids for millions of years.
The difference is that humans were not native to the Americas, and arrived rather suddenly some tens of thousands of years ago. Meanwhile animals in Africa (and Asia and Europe which were populated much earlier than the Americas) spent much more time co-evolving with humans as predators.
Why? They survived greater climatic change/habitat loss before.
Not unlike how our current wave of sustainability is a result of ruining our environment.
> The most problematic aspect of the paper is the speed with which it races from a single data point in Montana to humans playing a role in megafaunal extinctions hemisphere-wide,” David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University who was not involved in the work, tells the New York Times.
And while the findings are a “big deal,” as anthropologist Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona, who did not participate in the research, tells Science News, “I don’t know how you could ever test them unless you found more human remains.”
The reality: they ate whatever was plentiful in the particular area they were living in.
That seems about right to me, apart from avoiding salt. Wikipedia says humans of that time period did eat some grains too.
(a) zero infants killed and butchered their own mammoth;
(b) the meat from a dead mammoth was not held in reserve for infants.