Megafauna Extinction

There has been debate for at least fifty years whether the extinction of megafauna has been caused by human hunting or by climate change. The evidence has long pointed to hunting being the primary driver, at least to my eyes.  those who keep insisting "Well, it could be climate change" seem to want that answer to be true, because they want to roll that over into a modern climate change danger argument for cultural and legislative/regulatory purposes.

I am sure there are some who are fair brokers of the research, but my long impression is that they squint a lot to get the package they want to present.  Most notably, the phrase climate change is currently culturally loaded, referring primarily to anthropogenic warming plus a belief that extreme weather has become more common. They want to highlight the danger of this by pointing to extinctions of cool animals.  But cooling, especially freezing, has been a more frequent danger, and changes in rain and moisture have pressured species (and humans) as well. This is politely ignored.

Researchers at ECONOVO at Aarhus University in Denmark have concluded that it is hunting that has been decisive. For example

Extinctions occurred on all continents except Antarctica and in all types of ecosystems, from tropical forests and savannas to Mediterranean and temperate forests and steppes to arctic ecosystems. Svenning explains,

"Many of the extinct species could thrive in various types of environments. Therefore, their extinction cannot be explained by climate changes causing the disappearance of a specific ecosystem type, such as the mammoth steppe. Most of the species existed under temperate to tropical conditions and should actually have benefited from the warming at the end of the last ice age."

 This will have some impact on some people.  We hope.