Kill sites of other megafauna species which went extinct around the same time are missing. For a bold claim as that of a ‘blitzkrieg’ overkill this evidence is rather slim.

Next to Grayson and Meltzer, the Native American writer Vine Deloria, Jr. is probably the harshest critic of the ‘Pleistocene overkill’ hypothesis. In his book Red Earth, White Lies (1997) he criticizes – at times very polemically – the scholarly practices of the colonial sciences archaeology, paleontology, and anthropology and argues that the scenario of a ‘Pleistocene overkill’ lacks any convincing evidence, merely making Native Americans and their ancestors the scapegoat for the extinctions (97). Deloria passionately counter-argues Martin’s claim and raises the question as to why the overkill scenario did not spare megacarnivores, while “smaller-sized animals, which would have been easier to kill” were not affected by the Paleo-Indian hunting rage (103). In another chapter, Deloria responds to Jared Diamond’s calculations of the population size necessary to account for the hunting ‘blitzkrieg’. Referring to the lack of evidence on which the ‘Pleistocene overkill’ hypothesis is based, Deloria jokes that the population of 10 million Paleo-Indians, as Diamond has calculated, “should have left a little graffiti and picnic litter somewhere” (145).  

The Search Goes on: How Did the Pleistocene Megafauna Die?

There is a large number of alternative explanations for the collapse of the Pleistocene megafauna. In most cases, these explanations leave a few questions open. For example, zoologist Norman Owen-Smith has argued that neither climate change nor human predation provide a sufficient explanation for the Pleistocene extinctions. The changing climate “fails to predict the increased likelihood of extinctions with increasing body size, greater severity in both North and South America than in Eurasia or Australia, lack of simultaneous extinctions in Africa and tropical Asia, and the absence of extinctions at the end of previous glacial periods,” whereas the overkill hypothesis “fails to explain the simultaneous extinctions of a number of mammalian and avian species not obviously vulnerable to human overkill” (351). Instead Owen-Smith emphasizes the important role of large herbivores and how a decrease in their populations could cause the regional flora and fauna to change, which eventually results in the extinction of some, but not all species.^[2] With regard to American herbivores this scenario seems possible, but the culprits would be the same and the problem of sparse evidence remains.

In a similar way, many recent theories try to establish a compromise between focusing on extensive human predation and entirely dismissing the impact of hunters. For instance, a team of scientists around ethnobiologist Steve Wolverton (2009) argued that an increase in biomass production and seasonal change may have made large herbivores particularly vulnerable to extinction, and concluded that these two factors “appear to have worked in tandem to contribute significantly to, if not simply cause, the late Pleistocene extinctions” (56). At the same time, Wolverton and his colleagues do not exclude the possible influence of human predation. Final conclusions about the fate of the Pleistocene giants have not yet been reached, and there is an unabated fascination with mammoths and mastodons.

The Pleistocene Debate: Why Does It Matter?

Discussions about the fate of the Pleistocene megafauna are politically and ecologically relevant. Questions of who or what shaped North America’s distant past have an impact on the rights and identities of Native Americans today. Searching for who killed off America’s once imposing megafauna, some scholars have no problem to name the ancestors of Native Americans as the prime suspects. Yet when the identity of prestigious finds such as that of ‘Kennewick Man’ (link to article) is in question, many American scientists dismissed the possibility of a connection to America’s present indigenous people and related the skeleton to ancient Asian populations. These ‘findings’ apparently still follow the need to justify America’s colonial history and the removal of Native Americans during the colonial period and the ecologically at times disastrous settlement of the American continent. The overkill hypothesis, presented as accepted wisdom in popular scientific discourse, combines a strong mythical narrative of indigenous savagism with a remarkable lack of sufficient scientific evidence. Scholars like Shepard Krech III extend the overkill thesis into much more recent times and hold Native Americans responsible for the more recent destruction of America’s charismatic fauna, basing their claim on the indigenous people’s unfamiliarity with Western concepts and strategies of conservation and ecology. This Eurocentric rhetoric, criticized by several authors, gave rise to the “myth of the un-ecological Indian” (Mackenthun, “Bisoncide”).

It is somewhat bizarre how the impact of one story (i.e. the ‘Pleistocene overkill’) helped to create a veritable myth. This myth has specific political implications: if the indigenous people of America have behaved and still behave in an ‘unecological’ manner, their claims to special hunting or fishing rights may easily dwindle. In the age of conservationism this reasoning can be quite influential. It supports the Western perspective that hunting and gathering are not only uneconomical, but actually dangerous for the environment. This view, however, ignores that ‘hunter-gatherer’ land use did not work within the capitalistic framework of profit and wealth. ’Hunter-gatherers’ on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean had different concepts of ‘wealth’ in pre-capitalist times. On the American side, more emphasis was placed on sustainability while in feudalist Europe the aristocracy insisted on its prerogative to hunt.^[3] The myth of the Indian as savage hunter of megafauna also diverts attention from the fact that the impact of a capitalistic, modern world was and is environmentally by far more devastating. The extant Bison bison, for example, had almost been exterminated by European-American settlers in the 19th century.