To confirm, you find the climate change extinction hypotheses very credible here? I know very little about the topic except I vaguely recall that some scholars also advanced climate change as the hypothesis for the megafauna extinctions but these days it’s generally considered substantially less credible than human origin.
From what I can tell, the climate change one seems like the one with the most support in the literature. I’m not sure how much the consensus in favor of the human cause of megafauna extinctions (which I buy) generalizes to the extinction of other species in the Homo genus. Most of the Homo extinctions happened much earlier than the megafauna ones. But it could be—I have not given much thought to whether this consensus generalizes.
The other thing is that “extinction” sometimes happened in the sense that the species interbred with the larger population of Homo sapiens, and I would not count that as the relevant sort of extinction here.
Thanks for the reply! I appreciate it and will think further.
To confirm, you find the climate change extinction hypotheses very credible here? I know very little about the topic except I vaguely recall that some scholars also advanced climate change as the hypothesis for the megafauna extinctions but these days it’s generally considered substantially less credible than human origin.
From what I can tell, the climate change one seems like the one with the most support in the literature. I’m not sure how much the consensus in favor of the human cause of megafauna extinctions (which I buy) generalizes to the extinction of other species in the Homo genus. Most of the Homo extinctions happened much earlier than the megafauna ones. But it could be—I have not given much thought to whether this consensus generalizes.
The other thing is that “extinction” sometimes happened in the sense that the species interbred with the larger population of Homo sapiens, and I would not count that as the relevant sort of extinction here.