Humans Blamed for Extinction of Mammoths, Mastodons & Giant Sloths

Figure 1. The Royal Society 2014

The latest volley in a long-running debate over why woolly mammoths, giant sloths, mastodons and cave lions died out worldwide suggests that humans are to blame.

A new global look at the extinctions of large mammals over the past 130,000 years finds that the loss of species correlates more closely with the arrival of humans than with changes in climate, which some studies have cited as a possible culprit.

Nonetheless, the paper is unlikely to settle the debate over what really caused the Quaternary extinction, a die-off of large mammals worldwide at the end of the Pleistocene epoch about 12,000 years ago. It is, however, one of the first fine-grained, yet global, look at how and when species died.

"The evidence really strongly suggests that people were the defining factor," said study leader Chris Sandom, co-founder of the consulting firm Wild Business Ltd., who completed the work as a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark. [...] livescience.com/


Actualización 06-06-14: La causa de la extinción de la megafauna miles de años atrás
...  Ahora, un nuevo estudio apunta, de forma inequívoca según sus autores, a la caza ejercida por el Hombre como la causa principal de la extinción en masa de grandes animales por todo el mundo durante ese periodo de cien mil años que esencialmente terminó al mismo tiempo que lo hizo la Era Glacial...