Is it climate warming or human hunting that led to megafauna extinction? This has been long debated, and a new radiocarbon dating results supporting this explanation, has brought this controversy to a standstill – it is climate warming.
The mammoths and horses is found to have disappeared from the continent around 12,000 years ago, and bison, moose, wapiti and humans have multiplied and spread across the globe with the changing climate that started around 13,000 years ago. These data have been compiled from radiocarbon dates of the permafrost-preserved fossils of these six species by Arctic biologist R. Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
The forage favoring grazers such as bison, wapiti and moose did not exist in the region before 13,000 years ago. They seem to have proliferated rapidly after the change in vegetation, however.
Via: Scientific American