> 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.
"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
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_...
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.
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.
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"...
Brb doing a PhD in paleoepizootiology.
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.
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.
Elephants will go out of their way to kill lion cubs and, according to Tanzanian anecdote, human children.