A major academic theory explaining the disappearance of megabeasts coming out of the last ice age is that migrants from Asia hunted them to extinction. These academics apparently don't get out of their ivory towers much if they seriously think a few thousand persons armed with pointed sticks can hunt over a dozen species of beasts to extinction in a few hundred years. This is absurd on so many levels.
For example, Neanderthals used this type weapon and were built like WWE professional wrestlers. Their remains show major injury was common. Had their coordinated hunting method using spears been as prolifically successful as these same tactics supposedly were in North America, Neanderthals would have expanded to populate the earth rather than disappearing from the fossil record 25K years ago.
Another consideration comes from modern hunters. Many enjoy hunting with long bows, compound bows, and cross bows, all superior to pointed sticks, but modern hunters do not go after grizzly bears. They hunt species that run away if missed or wounded. Short-faced bears, one of the megabeasts driven extinct, were thought to have a personality ill-tempered enough to make grizzlies seem sunny in disposition. Short-faced bears drove lesser species off their kills, and would probably view men with pointed sticks contesting a kill like cannibals might view the arrival of a pizza delivery guy.An indication of the actual hunting prowess of the American immigrants can be drawn from the history of the Lakota. The Lakota were respected, if not feared, by adjacent tribes, but these tribes also tell of the Lakota before horses. Lakota were a tribe of ne'er do wells who did not command any land along a river, so spent their time in subsistence hunting of bison. Once the Spanish horses proliferated and migrated up to the northern plains, the now-mounted Lakota could kill sufficient meat in one day per month to leave the other 29 days free for mischief.
The academics point out that the North American immigrants had a new technology for their pointed sticks--the Clovis point. Clovis points, named for Clovis, NM, where they were first discovered, are indeed an advance, and were wide spread over the 48-state area of what would become the United States. However, they are still just the pointed end of a pointed stick. The Clovis point was unknown in Asia, where the migrants originated. The Asian level of technology was inserting flint chips in a grooved line in the spear point--or in an animal bone. Yet, the megabeasts went extinction in Asia simultaneously.
In all probability, the extinctions resulted from either the Younger Dryas, or whatever caused the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a 1300-year span where temperatures returned to ice-age levels. The cause of this reversion continues in debate, ranging from a release of fresh water into the North Atlantic, halting the warm currents from the south (think Gulf Stream); a meteor strike causing a nuclear winter; a volcano in Switzerland. None concur with all the circumstances of the time--or have the expected substantiating happenings.
For example, there has been ongoing argument whether the Younger Dryas was a local, or just northern hemisphere, or world-wide event. Apparently the ice cores from Antarctic have settled the argument--it was world wide--but it occurred in the southern hemisphere several hundred years earlier and was warming when the northern hemisphere cooled.In other words, one may logically conclude all their theories are inadequate, and another is needed. The academics also argue that the Younger Dryas cold should not have killed the megabeasts who had just survived tens of thousands of years of ice age. Good point. The key may be in the speed of onset. Ice cores show it happened within a decade and maybe much shorter. If the stories of mastodons and mammoths frozen so quickly their stomach contents remained fresh, "much shorter" would be more like "abruptly." The bulk of a beast like an elephant is such that upon death their body heat cooks as well as digests their stomach contents--but these mastodons and mammoths were frozen too fast for that to happen. The sudden chill was enormous--such as happened in the movie The Day After Tomorrow.
The key here is "if the stories are true." Most mammoth and mastodon remains show normal decay, leaving only bones.
The academics have now come up with a new cause for the Younger Dryas. Man killed off these giant herbivores so fast, the world-wide generation of methane, a greenhouse gas some twenty times more potent than CO2, ceased, causing the Younger Dryas cooling.
I am not only amused, but envious they get paid to generate such.
