What caused the Pleistocene Mass Extinction?

[Sully]

Ross Barnett in his book "The Missing Lynx" supports the overkill hypothesis. He outlines that these same megafauna survived climate change previously in inter quaternary periods. And furthermore that the extinctions were selective (Miracinonyx and not acinonyx, stag moose and not moose) and ranged between multiple habitat niches, which cannot be explained by climate change. He also describes how the same species survived much longer in areas that humans had not inhabited (mammoths on Wrangel island for example). He asserts that there is no model which adequately explains worldwide extinctions of slow reproducing species. He contrasts this with multiple examples of humans arriving in an area correlating with megafaunal extinctions, this is true for Australia, Eurasia, North America and South America. He supplements this with the vast amount of evidence of human hunting in the fossil record, disproportionately so.

I used to subscribe to the idea that climate change weakened populations and humans pushed them over the edge, but Barnett makes a very compelling case that it is the fault of migrating humans and it's hard to disagree. The most compelling piece of evidence in my eyes being how different the Holocene is in this case to other periods of ice age warming, and there is one clear added variable which separates them. Reply