20,000 to 7000 BCE · Africanspan
Every continent humans reached lost its big animals, except the one we came from
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As people spread through the Americas the large animals went. In North America, between roughly twenty thousand and ten thousand years ago, thirty-five genera disappeared: ground sloths, dire wolves, the saber cat, the American lion, along with horses, camels, mammoths and mastodons. South America lost another fifty-two genera over the same stretch, close to four fifths of its megafauna, though three animals held on longer. The giant armadillo, the giant ground sloth and a saber-toothed cat may still have been alive two or three thousand years after 9700 BCE. The same thing had already happened in Eurasia. Australia lost fourteen genera by 30,000 BCE. Africa is the exception, and the reason is that African elephants, rhinos, hippos and big cats had grown up alongside humans and had time to learn us. Everywhere else our arrival was an ecological event of the first order. The idea that people lived lightly on the earth until industry arrived does not survive the extinction tables.
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