this is just a general response to the whole overkill hypothesis:
1. It doesn't make logical sense. All anthropological observation of extant hunter-gatherer peoples shows us that they do not slaughter any population of animals (even the
really easy to kill ones) in the numbers that the overkill theory implies , nor do they do it just non-chalantly, like we do for sport. Check any anthropological articles on hunter-gatherers and you'll no doubt see that this is true.
2. The megafauna, North American or in general, were just that:
megafauna. It means they were huge. Now, the earliest Americans were not like us, they didn't have high-powered rifles that would enable them to take down an animal with a single kill-shot to the head. At best, they had bows and arrows and spear-throwers, and the very least, lances and axes. It's not exactly the smartest endeavor to go after something the size of an elephant or larger with that kind of weaponry on a significantly repeated basis. Maybe every once and a while, but not all the time.
3. Most large "kill sites" of megafaune in North America and Siberia are found near the arctic circle, in northern Siberia and Alaska. Here, the bones of thousands of mammoths and other megafauna have been found buried deep in muck and other organic debris; though no bones found so far show any markings that would imply human butchering of the carcasses. In fact, most of the ivory sold throughout the middle 1800s through the early 1900s came from "islands" found north of Siberia that were made up almost entirely of fossilized mammoth bones, sand, and mud. This alone implies some sort of climactic activity is responsible...unless of course early hunter-gatherers would go to the trouble of killing and butchering the animals before towing them several dozens to hundreds of miles offshore to dump them in the freezing arctic waters...
What do these three points imply? They imply that while the early Native Americans may have hunted done
some megafauna, they more than likely did not bring about their extinction. Also, recent comparions of fossilized megafauna (focusing on morphology and what genetic material can be reclaimed) to their extant "descendant" species (like the Giant Buffalo and the Buffalo, the Giant Puma and the Puma, the Giant Beaver and the Beaver, etc.) have shown that there is no significant difference between the megafauna and the extant creatures except for size; thus implying that while the mammoth and some other creatures may have gone extinct, most of the megafauna are alive today...they're just got smaller for some reason.
I'm not too clear on this part myself, so don't harass me if I get it wrong, but I've read that there might be a correlation between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the size of living beings. It's possible that there was significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere before the Ice Age, and when it hit (cold water absorbs carbon very easily) CO2 levels dropped and many animals became smaller. Again, just a possibility, but it would satisfactorily explain the disappearance of many megafaunal species.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Put in a couple more blank lines.
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