The issue of megafauna extinction at the end of the Pleistocene has been much discussed. Paul S. Martin (1984) maintains that human hunters were a principal cause. Other workers see both humans and climate change involved (Haynes 2002b), while others believe that climate alone was responsible (Guthrie 1990). N. K. Vereschagin (1971) reviewed this topic and related issues in considerable detail based on Russian Pleistocene paleontology and archaeology. He seems to favor the human and environmental combination as responsible for at least the demise of mammoths. On the other hand, Orlova et al. (2000a) do not see humans as having played an important role in the extinction of the Siberian mammoth population. Several years earlier, W. E. Garutt(1964) set the stage for Vereschagin’s work by inventorying all of the reported paleontological and archaeological mammoth finds in Eurasia, mainly Russia, and Alaska as of 1964. Orlova et al. (2000a) identified more than 120 sites in Siberia and the Russian Far East, with about 530 carbon-14 dates.
Whatever the cause of the megafaunal extinctions - temperature, vegetative changes, habitat reductions, disease, etc. - we feel human hunting added to the predation pressure by large carnivores. Today, in the Siberian, Primorsky, Mongolian, north China, and Korean regions, five species of large animals are in danger of going extinct: the tiger, Przewalski’s horse, Asiatic wild ass, wild Bactrian camel, and the sika (Fisher et al.
1969). Modern human hunting and habitat encroachment certainly hint that humans had a hand in the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions.
Given the many thousands of years of co-existence between the Mousterians and Arctic Steppe fauna, the extinction of both may be a consequence of the arrival of modern humans in Siberia, coincidentally with climate change that replaced the Arctic steppe habitat with taiga and tundra. Our study of perimortem bone damage has led us to the topic of megafaunal extinction, although not in a fully satisfactory way. We envision humans and carnivores consuming every species they encountered, which suggests climate change alone was not responsible for the demise of megafauna. Why? Because would not some species be expected to retain their niches or rapidly adapt to similar ones?
World History
