The "relatively newer" images you refer to seem to be nearly 12,000 years older than the images mentioned in this article. They're likely from a different culture entirely.

The images are of various ages. This article describes the subset that are the oldest, but there are newer ones mixed in. In some places you get layers of them, where you can see that the older ones were drawn over. They can estimate how much later they were added based on the presence of animals and objects that did not exist there 12,000 years ago.

It's true that there's a huge gap in time between the earliest paintings and the newer ones and so some aspects of the culture probably did change. But the area has been continuously populated for millennia.

You mean 12k years newer, not older.

I'm not positive what GP meant either, but if they were talking about horses, that is mentioned in the article as being there about 12,000 years ago, which is significantly before colonization that first GP mentioned as having brought horses to the area:

> the rock art shows how the earliest human inhabitants of the area would have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with pictures showing what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks.

Apparently, there were horses in the Americas, but they went extinct about 12k years ago, along with the other megafauna. What I understand is that different images could have been made in multiple time periods, from the first inhabitants up to today.

s/went extinct/were hunted to extinction by man

Horses are not extinct.

>Horses are not extinct.

"While genus Equus, of which the horse is a member, originally evolved in North America, these horse relatives became extinct on the continent approximately 8,000–12,000 years ago. In 1493, on Christopher Columbus' second voyage to the Americas, Spanish horses, representing E. caballus, were brought back to North America, first to the Virgin Islands; they were introduced to the continental mainland by Hernán Cortés in 1519. From early Spanish imports to Mexico and Florida, horses moved north, supplemented by later imports to the east and west coasts brought by British, French, and other European colonists. Native peoples of the Americas quickly obtained horses and developed their own horse culture.[5][6]"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_United_States

Blaming megafauna extinction on humans aligns with current misanthropic fashions, but rapid global warming at the end of the last ice age is a far more likely culprit. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21201-8

I think a far more likely scenario is "why not both?" And tbh, claiming the overkill/big black hole hypothesis is merely current fashion is overly simplistic. It was described in the 60s based on available data, and hey, we're getting better data now, so yay.

Hunting pressure places a population under stress, especially in species with a low replacement rate.

Climate change and the resulting changes in the ecosystem also puts populations under stress.

Maybe one of those stressors was survivable, but probably not both.

And for some megafaunal extinctions, especially on islands, it's pretty obvious humans were a key factor. Maybe not through hunting, just habitat loss could be sufficient (e.g., elephant bird), but often habitat loss went hand in hand with intensive hunting (e.g., moa)

This paper's worth a read. https://www.academia.edu/2644492/The_Associational_Critique_...

What comes with people migrating to new environments? New diseases.

It’s bizarre to me that hunting is the “regular suspect” in so many imaginations of the far past when the diseases transported by humans and their animals was almost certainly as substantial a factor in the far past as it was more recently.

Interesting point, what evidence is there of zoonotic vectors though?

I don't believe there's any clear evidence for this theory, though that doesn't mean anything. Die offs from disease don't really leave anything in the fossil record. But it's hard to favor a hypothetical explanation when there's other theories with at least some data supporting them around.

Wouldn’t that work in both directions though?

Which domesticated animals would those be in north and South America?

Domesticated? Human beings back then would have been a walking menagerie of pests, right? Seeds and plant matter, mice, mites, flees, pets, and yes if they managed to travel with livestock, them too.

All of which we know today are vectors for the spread of disease.

I have zero expertise to comment on what a primary contributor to population declines might’ve been for any given animal, I just find it fascinating (and baffling) that those who are experts seemingly ignore something that is undoubtedly a contributing factor.

As others point out this is of course understandable, because the story is less compelling. The image of humans with spears tracking down the last wild beast is one imaginations can’t resist. The image of slowly dying and decaying beasts, less so.

Might as well blame any other animal then

Actually was thinking on this, I suspect you're right that this is another potential stressor that should be considered.

Not so much diseases from animals brought by humans, but rather diseases/parasites from related animals who just mosied onto and sometimes over Beringia of their own accord.

E.g., wooly mammoths on the Eurasian steppes and American mastodons spent a lot of time developing in isolation, they could've had their own diseases they'd evolved to resist, then Beringia arises from the seas, and 100 years later, a mastodon catches the Mammmoth-flu or something.

From what little I understand, some of the N. American megafauna have been shown to have limited genetic diversity due to small founder populations, which we know can increase the vulnerability of a population to a novel disease.

I'm wondering how you'd be able to prove or disprove this though, maybe coprolites? Googling this briefly turned up this amazing website with the even more amazing tagline "#1 for fossilized #2"...

https://poozeum.com/

Brb doing a PhD in paleoepizootiology.

I don’t think it’s very credible to conclude the disappearance of both large herbivores has nothing to do with the arrival of a new, exceptionally adept and general apex predator.

Do you know when the megafauna of Madagascar went extinct? Right around the arrival of humans. What about New Zealand? Shortly after the arrival of humans. In every historical, known example of human introduction to a new ecosystem, most animals over 50lbs get eaten.

So what’s up with Africa then? Those ones didn’t taste good or what?

Pretty much the same thing it's just that Africa is huge.

And North and South America aren’t?

The animals there evolved with humans.

It's also interesting that essentially none of the native animals in Africa are domesticatable -- I think donkeys are the one thing we managed to domesticate there, most everything else was brought back from other continents.

Animals you'd think would be basically like other species we've domesticated, like zebras or gnus, take a strong "fuck you" attitude towards people and have resisted modern efforts to domesticate them.

You've been reading Guns, Germs, and Steel?

So NA megafauna had no problems with wolves but people come along and it’s game over. Still not buying this. Why did horses die out but not bison or deer? How did mammoth go extinct while elephants didn’t when elephants faced more technologically advanced humans over a longer time period? Just doesn’t add up.

I would propose that the megafauna of Africa is less naive regarding hominid predators.

Elephants will go out of their way to kill lion cubs and, according to Tanzanian anecdote, human children.

Younger Dryas caused megafauna extinction worldwide

Yes, that's what I meant!

Horses are native to North America and became extinct after the introduction of humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse

your comment makes it seem like colonists reintroduced a native species (idk if that was the intention, but that’s how it reads), when in reality the horse species that were once native in South America was quite different from European Horses.

It also makes it seem like their extinction was due to human action (again, idk if that was the intention), but it also could’ve been due to climate change.

The Mormon church believes Tapirs are what were being called 'horses' and what pulled chariots and such, as an apologetic way of covering the fact horses weren't on the continent, but Joseph Smith never knew that.

The key part from below is "Quaternary extinction event of most of the Pleistocene megafauna that is widely believed to have been a result of human hunting pressure."

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon#Extinction

>Fossil evidence indicates that mastodons probably disappeared from North America about 10,500 years ago as part of the Quaternary extinction event of most of the Pleistocene megafauna that is widely believed to have been a result of human hunting pressure. The latest Paleo-Indians entered the Americas and expanded to relatively large numbers 13,000 years ago, and their hunting may have caused a gradual attrition of the mastodon population.

As far as megafauna and climate, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_woolly_mammoth#...