Was climate change or human hunting mainly responsible for the disappearance of much of the megafauna?
Mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant sloths… What could have wiped them all out? The answer is us.
A large review of more than 300 scientific studies concludes that human hunting was the main factor behind the disappearance of much of the megafauna during the last 50,000 years.
And there is a fundamental clue: the extinctions occurred on different continents and climates, but they especially followed the expansion of humans.
The largest animals were also very vulnerable: they lived for many years, had few offspring, and their populations could not recover from continued hunting.
So the mammoth didn’t disappear simply because the planet changed. We had a lot to do with it.
Source: Jens-Christian Svenning et al, The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene, Cambridge Prisms: Extinction (2024). DOI: 10.1017/ext.2024.4
