The extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna may be people’s fault after all, according to a recent study.
A team of archaeologists recently examined animal bones at sites dating to the waning years of the last Ice Age. Their results suggest that extinct megafauna like giant sloths, giant armadillos, and elephant-like creatures were on the menu for Pleistocene hunters in South America. And that means human hunters may have played a nontrivial role in killing off the continent’s last great Ice Age megafauna.
Giant ground sloth: It’s what’s for dinner
Archaeologist Luciano Prates of Mexico’s National University of La Plata and his colleagues counted the animal bones left behind by ancient people at 20 archaeological sites in modern-day Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. They compared the number of bones from extinct megafauna (technically, “megafauna” describes any animal over 44 kilograms) to the number of bones from smaller prey. They also tallied the remains of still-living species of megafauna like vicuñas. The archaeologists hoped to learn whether giant sloths, giant armadillos, and now-extinct species of horses were staples in the diets of Ice Age South Americans.