Beginning about 50,000 years ago, very large animals that ranged over most of the planet began to go extinct. These gigantic species included the wooly mammoth and sabretooth cat, as well as flightless birds three times the size of an ostrich, lemurs as large as gorillas, and lizards that weighed half a ton. This era from 50,000 to 500 years ago is known as Near Time, and it includes the end of the last Ice Age, when sea levels rose and humans arrived in the Americas.
Somewhere between 750 and 1,000 species disappeared—primarily the largest animals on most continents and many islands—in the Near Time extinction. These animals had low reproductive rates and slow maturation, making them especially prone to extinction. Curiously, marine animals were not affected.
The cause of this remarkable event has been the subject of heated scientific debate for decades, and it falls into two broad categories. The first is climate change. The second is human depredations. Those in the climate change (this includes comets, volcanism, etc.) camp tend to discount any important role for people. Those in the human-caused camp discount changes in the environment. And, of course, there are hybrid and novel positions as well.
In the 1960s, Paul S. Martin, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona, advanced the theory that the Near Time extinctions were the result of human overhunting. In the Americas, he argued the extinction of thirty species of megafauna mammals coincided with the arrival of humans. Martin offered the idea of prey naïveté—that megafauna animals had no fear of human hunters and were easy victims to slaughter. The human overhunting theory has become the topic of an impassioned debate among American archaeologists ever since.
Author Ross MacPhee, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, lays out all of the arguments and all the facts in this engaging volume and comes to his own conclusions. It is superbly illustrated by artist Peter Schouten whose drawings of megafauna make these long-gone animals come to life. Well-written for the general reader, End of the Megafauna is a fabulous introduction to one of our most perplexing questions.
