Population Reconstructions for Humans and Megafauna Suggest Mixed Causes for North American Pleistocene Extinctions

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Dozens of large mammals such as mammoth, mastodon, and horse (i.e., "megafauna") disappeared in North America at the end of the Pleistocene with climate change and "overkill" 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 especially telling, as we expect increasing human populations to drive megafaunal declines if hunting caused extinctions. We present a novel test of this hypothesis here by using summed calibrated radiocarbon date distributions and simulations to reconstruct population levels of megafauna and humans. These results suggest that the causes for megafauna extinctions varied across taxa and by region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24858