| In the past, North America supported a wide variety of enormous creatures. |
| Between 11,000 and 10,000 B.C.E, |
| beasts like Mastodons, Giant Sloths and the Mammoth. |
| I could go on, the list is massive. |
| Rather suddenly, around 10,000 B.C.E, |
| all of these enormous beasts had vanished. |
| They were North American Megafauna, and they were gone. |
| No one is exactly sure what happened to them, but several theories have been discussed. |
| Human hunting, is one theory. |
| The beasts could have been hunted to extinction. |
| At the time that those animals roamed the continent, |
| the humans were called the Clovis People. |
| There is a site in southern california, featuring those people. |
| Within the site is a number of tools for processing meat, |
| as well as spear points, fireplaces, and the skeletons of 13 mammoths. |
| Mammoth bones have also been found at other Clovis People excavation sites. |
| However, just because they hunted the mammals didn't mean they did so to extinction. |
| Further evidence to the contrary includes strong hints |
| that the Clovis people tended to favor plant gathering and small game hunting. |
| Likewise, similar gatherings of mammoth skeletons have been found at... |
| what is obviously the site of an ancient natural disaster. |
| Avalanche, flood, any one of these could kill a large group of them. |
| Perhaps at the Clovis site mentioned, |
| the humans only took advantage of the aftermath of a natural disaster before they, too, were claimed. |
| Another theory is that of severe climate change. |
| Around 11,000 B.C.E, |
| humans started settling into areas, instead of being Nomadic hunter-gatherers. |
| The world was moving into one of its interglacial periods, or the warm times between Ice Ages. |
| Due to carbon dioxide and methane buildups in the atmosphere, |
| the entire world was insulated and warmed up significantly. |
| With warmer weathers, animals built to live in extreme colds would suffer stress in the heat, |
| and die from heat-stroke or dehydration. |
| Their physiology simply couldn't cope. |
| We take for granted that there are tropical zones near the equator, |
| grasslands, woodlands, and finally tundra as you move northward. |
| During Ice Age periods, the plants would have all been fairly mixed together, with high plant diversity in any one area. |
| With warmer climates, plants expanded outward, |
| survived as best they could, and resulted in more plant volume, |
| but less diversity in each area. |
| Another theory in addition to the heat-stroke one |
| is that large animals like our Megafauna could not get the plant diversity needed for their large diets, |
| and died of malnutrition. |
| While that may seem like a sound theory, |
| it does have one fatal flaw: |
| The world goes through cycles like this regularly, |
| and the last Ice-Age followed by a interglacial period had no mass extinction. |
| An article was recently published about an archeologist using the latest technology to try and solve this puzzle. |
| He scripted a computer program that would simulate the effects of certain environmental changes on a mammoth. |
| For example, if a drought persisted for a dozen years, |
| or hunters culled ten percent of the total mammoth population, |
| what would happen? |
| While no solid conclusion was made, he did have this to say: |
| "Hunters killing off every mammoth was not needed to push them toward extinction". |
| Huge creatures like elephants and, by extension, mammoths, reproduce very slowly. |
| The man created a simulation where humans killed off a few young females from the herd, |
| and gave them some added environmental stress. |
| The simulated mammoth herd all died within a few decades. |
| For now, scientists suspect a mixture of hunting and changing climate would have done the trick to smother these mighty beasts. |
| Unfortunately, we still do not have a concrete answer, |
| and no amount of computer simulations will replace finding solid evidence. |