Ice Age Extinctions of the Megafauna
ICE AGE EXTINCTIONS OF THE MEGAFAUNA During the last Ice Age before humans arrived, the North American continent belonged to various forms of enormous, fantastic creatures. By the end of the Ice Age, most of these large animals had become extinct. Numerous attempts have been made to explain the disappearance of these animals, but there has yet to be a consensus. Among the theories that have been debated, two are predominant. They are the climatic change theory, and the overkill theory. The climatic change theory advocates the idea that the global warming, which brought about the end of the Ice Age, caused the animals to die off. The other is the overkill theory, which maintains that humans, by over hunting the animals, are responsible for the extinctions. It is likely that many of these animals became extinct at the end of the Ice Age due to a combination of climatic change and overkill. The Ice Age, which began about one and a half million years ago, is also referred to as the Pleistocene Epoch. Much of the Pleistocene falls within the geological time period called the Quaternary stage. We are still in the Quaternary today. The Ice Age consisted of a series of
He claimed hunters would consume only a small portion of the kill leaving much waste. Suppose the change in climatic conditions did affect the megafaunal population. This new species was called the Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi). Ed Lehner discovered mammoth bones in 1952 on property that he later purchased (Grayson, 1993). The animals that migrated to this continent adapted to their new surroundings. In total, the bones of thirteen mammoths, one bison, and twenty-one stone tools have been unearthed at Lehner. This was probably not a mass kill, because Clovis people generally would track herds and not take more than one animal of the herd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. These huge, plant eating animals are called the megafauna. If climate change had not affected the faunal populations, the amount of animals on the continent when early people arrived would have been abundant. Many of the larger animals such as mammoths and bison travel in herds, and that, along with their large size, protects them from predators. While the Proboscidea originated in Asia and Africa and migrated to North America, other animals evolved in the New World and traveled across the land bridge in the opposite direction from North America to Eurasia. Of the thousands of archeological sites in North America, not one has contained the remains of any extinct animal that proves to be younger than 10,000 years old (Grayson, 1993). Many of the animals living on the continent were herbivorous and extremely large compared to the present fauna. For example, the glyptodont, similar to a turtle, would have been comparable in size to a Volkswagen Beetle.
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Acceptance Essays
