Overkill or climate?
The largest extinction debate in archaeology, and the honest answer is that it varies by continent.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 38 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 5 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
The Quaternary megafaunal extinctions kill most large land animals outside Africa. Two explanations compete: human hunting of naive prey, and the abrupt climatic reorganisation at the end of the glacial. The evidence resists a single answer — Africa, where hominins evolved alongside megafauna, loses least; Australia's losses follow human arrival with no clear climate trigger; North American population reconstructions correlate better with temperature than with human numbers. Analyses of individual species come out on both sides, and several point to climate stress plus hunting together.