Poultry, Fisheries & Wildlife Sciences
Open Access

Wild-life overkill

Wild-life overkill is an elimination or drastic reduction of an animal population by hunting or killing. The overkill hypothesis argues that humans were responsible for the Late Pleistocene extinction of megafauna in northern Eurasia and North and South America. Paul Martin of the University of Arizona and others see a chronological and causal link between the appearance of humans and the disappearance of many species of large mammals. According to the overkill hypothesis, when ancestors of native Americans entered North America about 14,000 calendar years ago, they encountered a large number of species that had no experience with humans. As a result, they did not recognize humans as a threat. The ancestral Indians (or Paleo-Indians, as they are sometimes called) were able to take advantage of this fact and were able to hunt the large mammals with great ease. The Paleo-Indians became specialist big game hunters concentrating on game like mammoths, giant bison, ground sloths, and other species of large size. They hunted dozens of species to the point of extinction, and indirectly caused the extinction of many smaller species as a consequence of ecological disruption. .

Related Journals of Wild-life overkill:

Paper of the Canadian Wildlife Service, Wildlife Biology in Practice, International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife