Afterword, and Thoughts About the Future Literature

Abstract

This book has collected the thoughts of expert archeologists, paleontologists, and paleoecologists, in addition to a specialist in ancient DNA studies, but in the end it is not possible for me as editor to identify a clear majority opinion (and hence solve the puzzle of extinction). Borrero (Chapter 8) sees little useful evidence in South America that human foragers had an impact on megafaunal populations; yet, referring to much of the same and other sets of fossil evidence in South America, Cione and associates (Chapter 7) lay the ultimate blame on the human factor, which was added to the ecological stresses imposed on megafauna by climate changes. Fisher (Chapter 4) proposes that central USA mastodont populations were in an apparently healthy phase just before they became extinct, which supports the idea that human hunting could have been the abrupt and fatal factor that caused extinctions. Surovell and Waguespack (Chapter 5) argue that human preference for killing the largest animals in North America is rational and supported by ethnographic, theoretical, and archeologi-cal data. My own paper (Chapter 3) suggests that megafaunal populations in North America were fragmented and much more vulnerable to human hunting during the Late Glacial. Fiedel (Chapter 2) presents a case based on the chronologies of extinction that the first indications of human hunting more closely track the disappearance dates of many species than do climate-changes, in both North and South America. MacPhee, on the other hand, while agreeing with other authors (who examined data from the late Pleistocene) that climate changes alone cannot cleanly account for extinctions in the West Indies, presents arguments that first human contacts in the Holocene did not wipe out species–instead the process was extended over many centuries, implying that they resulted from the synergy of habitat alterations, the introduction of exotic or competing species, and sustained human hunting pressures. Readers may scratch their heads in wonder that so much scientific evidence can lead to so many variations and disagreements. Perhaps future directions in research and the uncovering of new data will remove some of the nagging ambiguity.