Pleistocene Extinctions

New research suggesting the decline of the American megafauna was a combination of both climate change and human hunting happening at the same time. For a long time, there’s been a debate over whether the rapid extinction of so many large American mammals was because of the warming climates after the last Ice Age that turned a lot of grasslands into forests or whether it was because the first human residents of the Americas marching rapidly south through the Americas after being stuck in the Arctic for several thousands years wiped them out through hunting. The most sensible answer was always that it was a combination of the two factors and now it’s pretty clearly the case.

Luckily, there’s no connection between a rapidly warming climate and human interventions decimating wildlife today so we have nothing to worry about.