The “overkill” hypothesis postulates that dozens of species outside of Africa were wiped out during the Ice Age by human hunting, which begs the question: Why would ancient humans have devoted so much time and energy to eliminating megafauna? Paul Martin — who first developed the hypothesis in the 1960s — portrayed it as a “blitzkrieg”, with megafauna in North America being overwhelmed by this formidable new predator and wiped out within 1,000 years of first contact. Scientists currently see the process unfolding at a slower rate, over thousands of years.
But few have attempted to really address the vital question of “why”. One 2006 study did address this issue — the only one that I am aware of — asking: “If overkill was the cause, why did it happen?” The authors asked why humans would have survived after the megafauna populations they presumably relied on collapsed. “We propose the cause was …
small animals or ‘mini-fauna’. As people allocate more effort to hunting mini-fauna, more opportunities for chance encounters with megafauna arise, which leads to more megafauna harvests,” the authors wrote in theJournal of Economic Behaviour & Organisation. This thesis flounders on its focus on “harvests”, which is premised on the notion that megafauna hunting must have primarily been aimed at providing sustenance for pre-historic humans.
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But that is not the only motivation for hunting — or killing. This speaks to why humans survived the megafauna extinctions — the big animals were not a primary food source. Some experts have speculated that extinct megafauna species were sought because the danger involved raised the social status of the hunters.
Like modern trophy hunting, this would have presumably been selective and not driven any species over the cliff of extinction — contrary to the spurious claims made by some current campaigners seeking to ban the practice. But the dangerous element of such hunting — and the danger posed to humans by the big animals that were hunted to extinction — are surely telltale signs that have been curiously missed. The fact of the matter is that most species of terrestrial megafauna — those that went extinct during the Pleistocene and early Holocene and the survivors — were, and are, dangerous from a human perspective. Elephants and their kin offer an arresting example.
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