A View on Late Pleistocene Megafauna Extinction in Sahul: An Emu Hunt Revisited

Summary

The extinction of megafauna across the globe generates lively and sometimes heated discussion on timing and cause. In the case of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea), the debate is divided into two distinct camps – those that hold a firm belief that humans were responsible, and those that consider the current datasets to thin to provide any definitive answer. These big picture issues are reliant on the acquisition of data from individual sites and data on megafauna comes predominantly from cave sites, as well as rockshelters and fluvial deposits where material is rarely identified in a primary context. Yet, as Jim O’Connell so clearly articulates in the Emu Hunt paper, the likely location for interactions of humans and these large beasts are open sites such as ephemeral waterholes. Currently there is only one site in Australia where a record of megafauna and humans co-occurs and it falls into this category. Cuddie Springs is an ephemeral waterhole in the modern semi-arid southeast of Sahul, and was part of the arid zone when the site was formed. Here I will revisit the Cuddie Springs evidence to consider the likely role, if any, of people in the extinction of the Sahul megafauna suite.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• A Sense of Question: Papers in Honor of James F. O'Connell

Keywords

Spatial Coverage