Great piece. I looked into this about 5 years ago, more superficially, and came to the same conclusion. My guess was that opposition to overkill was politically motivated. People didn't want to "blame" indigenous populations or spoil the idea of that they lived in harmony with nature. Is there a better error theory?
I thought this was already the prevailing hypothesis. I read it in Jared Diamond book decades ago. The reason they survived in Africa is because humans co-evolved with them.
I just want to add that humans needn’t have killed large predators directly if we killed enough of the large herbivores they relied on.
Honestly, surprised to learn this is a debate. I used to be really into prehistoric animals and the impression I got from reading Wikipedia on these animals was that everyone was pretty confident. Humans caused their extinction. Honestly surprised to learn that the political bias is in favour of climate change here because while I can understand it after the fact it just seems obvious that humans causing extinction on a mass scale through hunting is something that an environmentalist would find pretty politically congenial given the obvious implications for endangered species in the modern day. Hell, that’s kind of how my childhood self interpreted it.
In general I agree with your logic but the idea you bring up (and I don't get the impression you are necessarily arguing this, just citing the opinions of others) that some in the field feel it should have been decided years ago or that it's in any way an embarrassment makes no sense, and ought to be pushed back on.
It's putting the cart before the horse, logically speaking: the reason we should give the human hunting hypothesis more credence now is precisely because the evidence has shifted and we have new methods of analysis. The initial hypothesis proposed in the '60s also differs significantly from what we might believe today, with modern consensus beginning to coalesce around the slow persistent hunting as opposed to the original orgy of violence / blitzkrieg theory.
I'm not sure about the evidence for the current hypothesis that would have existed at the time, but I don't think that's the case for Martin's original hypothesis, which is really the origin of the modern version of this argument. But the current evidence doesn't support it either. Martin's fast extinction hypothesis from the '60s is significantly different from the gradual pressure argument that is gaining popularity.
* Lack of specific kill sites is much more of a problem for the blitzkrieg hypothesis that Martin proposed, but to be expected for a slower pressure based extinction model like the one that is gaining popularity today
* Martin's argument was explicitly framed around a Clovis first framework, which is not supported by current evidence either.
* We found evidence of prolonged overlap of megafauna and humans, which is a clear cut objection to Martin's hypothesis but again not to the gradual extinction hypothesis
* The prey naivete theory is a significant part of Martin's hypothesis as well, and simply doesn't fit with what we know about prehuman predation
Martin was moving in the right direction, but his argument itself was rightly viewed with skepticism because it didn't fit the data.
There are serious questions about the precise mechanics of human hunting killing megafauna--how quickly it was and so on. But I think at that time it was already clear that human activity was the main culprit, even if the details were still being worked out.
That may be (personally I think it's an overstatement but I'm about at the limits of my knowledge about 1960s archaeological data), but nobody had proposed a model yet that actually fit the data. So I think it would be a bit silly to frame that as embarrassing. Or if it is embarrassing, it's embarrassing for both sides! Neither had a strong hypothesis.
I think pretty shortly after Darwin proposed his theory, it was clear that the case for it was decisive, even though it took a while to work out the details.
Well, suffice to say I respectfully but firmly disagree on that point. We knew precious little about prehistoric human movement before the 20th century, and almost nothing about extinction dates, historical climate data, etc. Even the precise style of Bayesian argument you are using didn't exist in 1900, much less the evidence.
It does seem likely this is pretty much just caused by the fact most academics subscribe to a woke version of Rousseau’s Noble Savage thesis and don’t like the idea of ‘indigenous people’ also being human like the rest of us.
I'm interested in the spiritual implications of humanity causing the mega-fauna extinction. Yuval Noah Harari touches on this ancient narrative in his introduction to Animal Liberation Now. Humanity has terrorized and obliterated our fellow creatures for what is now 60,000 years... what does that say about our species? And how do we rectify these harms?
Great piece. I looked into this about 5 years ago, more superficially, and came to the same conclusion. My guess was that opposition to overkill was politically motivated. People didn't want to "blame" indigenous populations or spoil the idea of that they lived in harmony with nature. Is there a better error theory?
I think that plus not being Bayesian.
Also “global warming” has more political salience
For the same reason, some want to downplay the extent to which prehistoric humans engaged in warfare, despite evidence that they did.
I thought this was already the prevailing hypothesis. I read it in Jared Diamond book decades ago. The reason they survived in Africa is because humans co-evolved with them.
I just want to add that humans needn’t have killed large predators directly if we killed enough of the large herbivores they relied on.
Honestly, surprised to learn this is a debate. I used to be really into prehistoric animals and the impression I got from reading Wikipedia on these animals was that everyone was pretty confident. Humans caused their extinction. Honestly surprised to learn that the political bias is in favour of climate change here because while I can understand it after the fact it just seems obvious that humans causing extinction on a mass scale through hunting is something that an environmentalist would find pretty politically congenial given the obvious implications for endangered species in the modern day. Hell, that’s kind of how my childhood self interpreted it.
In general I agree with your logic but the idea you bring up (and I don't get the impression you are necessarily arguing this, just citing the opinions of others) that some in the field feel it should have been decided years ago or that it's in any way an embarrassment makes no sense, and ought to be pushed back on.
It's putting the cart before the horse, logically speaking: the reason we should give the human hunting hypothesis more credence now is precisely because the evidence has shifted and we have new methods of analysis. The initial hypothesis proposed in the '60s also differs significantly from what we might believe today, with modern consensus beginning to coalesce around the slow persistent hunting as opposed to the original orgy of violence / blitzkrieg theory.
My sense is even a few decades ago the evidence was still pretty lopsided.
I'm not sure about the evidence for the current hypothesis that would have existed at the time, but I don't think that's the case for Martin's original hypothesis, which is really the origin of the modern version of this argument. But the current evidence doesn't support it either. Martin's fast extinction hypothesis from the '60s is significantly different from the gradual pressure argument that is gaining popularity.
* Lack of specific kill sites is much more of a problem for the blitzkrieg hypothesis that Martin proposed, but to be expected for a slower pressure based extinction model like the one that is gaining popularity today
* Martin's argument was explicitly framed around a Clovis first framework, which is not supported by current evidence either.
* We found evidence of prolonged overlap of megafauna and humans, which is a clear cut objection to Martin's hypothesis but again not to the gradual extinction hypothesis
* The prey naivete theory is a significant part of Martin's hypothesis as well, and simply doesn't fit with what we know about prehuman predation
Martin was moving in the right direction, but his argument itself was rightly viewed with skepticism because it didn't fit the data.
There are serious questions about the precise mechanics of human hunting killing megafauna--how quickly it was and so on. But I think at that time it was already clear that human activity was the main culprit, even if the details were still being worked out.
That may be (personally I think it's an overstatement but I'm about at the limits of my knowledge about 1960s archaeological data), but nobody had proposed a model yet that actually fit the data. So I think it would be a bit silly to frame that as embarrassing. Or if it is embarrassing, it's embarrassing for both sides! Neither had a strong hypothesis.
I think pretty shortly after Darwin proposed his theory, it was clear that the case for it was decisive, even though it took a while to work out the details.
Well, suffice to say I respectfully but firmly disagree on that point. We knew precious little about prehistoric human movement before the 20th century, and almost nothing about extinction dates, historical climate data, etc. Even the precise style of Bayesian argument you are using didn't exist in 1900, much less the evidence.
Damn right. We’d do it again, too. Fuck those giant sloths.
lol
It does seem likely this is pretty much just caused by the fact most academics subscribe to a woke version of Rousseau’s Noble Savage thesis and don’t like the idea of ‘indigenous people’ also being human like the rest of us.
I'm interested in the spiritual implications of humanity causing the mega-fauna extinction. Yuval Noah Harari touches on this ancient narrative in his introduction to Animal Liberation Now. Humanity has terrorized and obliterated our fellow creatures for what is now 60,000 years... what does that say about our species? And how do we rectify these harms?
Something something correlation is not causation