LONDON -- "The survivors are scraps," says evolutionary biologist Dr. John Alroy about the large mammal species that remain in North America after the wave of extinctions that followed the arrival of the first humans less than 14,000 years ago. And there is no longer any question about why all the rest -- mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, camels, horses, giant armadillos, and deer the size of moose -- died out. In his article in this month's Science, Alroy puts the blame firmly on human beings.
Paul Martin of the University of Arizona first raised this "New World Blitzkrieg" theory back in 1967. It has always been puzzling how many more big animal species there are in Africa, Europe and Asia, where humans and their immediate ancestors have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, than in the Americas and Australia, where they arrived all of a sudden and relatively recently. Martin suggested that it was because the Indians and the Australian aborigines killed them off -- and unleashed a firestorm of protest.
The angriest protesters were the North American Indians themselves, who felt they were being robbed of their last shred of cultural dignity. They had lost their land, their future, and in many cases even their language to the European invaders. About their only consolation was their belief that they had some special spiritual status as the stewards of the land; that they were people with a special gift for living in harmony with nature.