HUMANS, not changing climates, could have been responsible for the extinction of mammoths, mastodons and elephants across most of the world.
Anthropologists have known for many years that these large animals – once widespread on every continent except Australia and Antarctica – vanished from the archaeological record in each area at about the time humans appeared, ranging from 1.8 million years ago in Africa to just 10,000 years ago in the Americas. However, a causal link has been difficult to establish because human arrival and animal extinction cannot be dated precisely enough to prove they coincided.
Todd Surovell of the University of Wyoming in Laramie tried a different tack that was less dependent on precise dating. He and his colleagues identified 41 archaeological sites from Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas that contained good evidence that humans had hunted or scavenged these large animals. They found that these sites always existed at the fringes of expanding human settlements. But in areas where humans had lived for long periods they found no evidence of kills, which suggests there were no animals left (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0501947102).
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If climate change was responsible for the demise of the animals, then kill sites should have been more evenly distributed throughout areas occupied by humans.
