ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Overkill, glacial history, and the extinction of North America's Ice Age megafauna.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 94 citations in OpenAlex.
- Why it is easier to date Quaternary extinctions than human colonizations under conditions of overkill.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Article
- Characterizing the American Upper Paleolithic.Science advances · 2025Review
- Extinct megafauna dominated human subsistence in southern South America before 11,600 years ago.Science advances · 2025Article
- Global spatiotemporal patterns of demographic fluctuations in terrestrial vertebrates during the Late Pleistocene.Science advances · 2025Article
- An update onPeerJ · 2025Article
- Hidden population turnover of small odontocetes in the northwestern North Pacific during the Holocene.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Genomic Analyses Capture the Human-Induced Demographic Collapse and Recovery in a Wide-Ranging Cervid.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Mitogenomes revealed the history of bison colonization of Northern Plains after the Last Glacial Maximum.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Marine conservation palaeobiology: What does the late Quaternary fossil record tell us about modern-day extinctions and biodiversity threats?Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2023Review
- Wandering mastodons reveal the complexity of Ice Age extinctions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Review
- Small brains predisposed Late Quaternary mammals to extinction.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Late Pleistocene shrub expansion preceded megafauna turnover and extinctions in eastern Beringia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
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Abstract
The end of the Pleistocene in North America saw the extinction of 38 genera of mostly large mammals. As their disappearance seemingly coincided with the arrival of people in the Americas, their extinction is often attributed to human overkill, notwithstanding a dearth of archaeological evidence of human predation. Moreover, this period saw the extinction of other species, along with significant changes in many surviving taxa, suggesting a broader cause, notably, the ecological upheaval that occurred as Earth shifted from a glacial to an interglacial climate. But, overkill advocates ask, if extinctions were due to climate changes, why did these large mammals survive previous glacial-interglacial transitions, only to vanish at the one when human hunters were present? This question rests on two assumptions: that previous glacial-interglacial transitions were similar to the end of the Pleistocene, and that the large mammal genera survived unchanged over multiple such cycles. Neither is demonstrably correct. Resolving the cause of large mammal extinctions requires greater knowledge of individual species' histories and their adaptive tolerances, a fuller understanding of how past climatic and ecological changes impacted those animals and their biotic communities, and what changes occurred at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary that might have led to those genera going extinct at that time. Then we will be able to ascertain whether the sole ecologically significant difference between previous glacial-interglacial transitions and the very last one was a human presence.
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