A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 138

Pacific coast, sabretooth salmon ( Oncorhynchus rastrosus ) nine feet
long migrated up the rivers.
All these remarkable beasts disappeared at around the same time.
generally between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. Their extinction
coincides with the arrival and dispersal of the first technologically
sophisticated people in the hemisphere: hunters using finely worked
stone weapons. The evidence suggests that it was not, as many palae-
ontologists first supposed, primarily climate change that wiped out
the American megafauna: 51 it had survived massive fluctuations in the
recent past, and the habitats that many of the missing species required
still exist. They were hunted to extinction.*
The animals of the New World had never encountered humans before,
except perhaps some scattered bands with basic technologies. So, like
the unfortunate beasts of the islands discovered by Europeans, they
probably stood and watched, without fear, as the hunters approached.
Had the Mesolithic people of the Americas eaten everything they
killed, they would scarcely have trimmed the herds of game, so small
were their numbers. One ground sloth could have fed a clan of hunters
for months. The speed with which the megafauna of the Americas col-
lapsed might suggest that they slaughtered everything they encountered.†
Among those who broke into the New World, anyone could be a The-
seus or a Hercules: slaying improbable monsters, laying up a stock of
epic tales to pass to their descendants. Like all those who have discovered
wildlife in its unexploited state - the sailors who found the dodos in
Mauritius or the whales in the southern oceans, the fishermen who first
assayed the Grand Banks off Newfoundland - they might have thought
the sport would last for ever. Perhaps the care with which some indigen-
ous people of the Americas engage with the natural world came later.
* William Ripple and Blaire Van Valkenburgh caution that the populations of large
herbivores are likely to have been low, as they were suppressed by predators and sub-
ject to trophic cascades. This could have made it easy for humans to have driven them
to extinction. 52
† Again, it is worth bearing the alternative hypothesis in mind: that the herbivores
could have been tipped into extinction easily, as their numbers were low. If people
deprived other predators of their largest prey, those predators would have been forced
to kill smaller animals (as wolves in Alaska do when hunters have reduced the moose
population). This might have created a powerful knock-on effect, as extinctions
cascaded down the food chain.