"After centuries of debate, paleontologists are converging towards the conclusion that human overkill caused the massive extinction of large animals in the late Pleistocene."
So sayeth a new paper to be published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization which proposes that the deaths of woolly mammoths and other Ice Age animals 12,000 years ago were the result of humans having chance encounters with megafauna while out hunting smaller game.
Such "converging" toward overkill may come as news to paleontologists.
Here is a link to the abstract of the paper (those with subscriptions to Science Direct will get the whole thing):
After centuries of debate, paleontologists are converging towards the conclusion that human overkill caused the massive extinction of large mammals in the late Pleistocene. This paper revisits the question of previous megafaunanext term extinction by incorporating economic behavior into the debate. We allow for endogenous human population growth, and labor allocation decisions involving activities such as wildlife harvesting and (proto) agriculture. We find that the role of agriculture in deciding the fate of previous termmegafaunanext term was small. In contrast, the presence of ordinary small animals that have been overlooked in previous non-economic extinction models is likely to have been much more important.
We haven't read the actual paper yet. It seems odd even mentioning agriculture or even proto-agriculture though.
Here is the same writer's take on the proposed change to NAGPRA, the famous "or was" amendment: The Politics of Dead 'Native Americans'. We're pretty much of the same opinion on the proposed change as Kintigh from SAA is, i.e., that any remains will still have to pass the test of cultural affiliation before repatriation can occur. The ultimate effect will probably be to increase court cases for disputed remains, which the original Kennewick decision seemingly would have prevented.