What if the Megafauna Extinction didn't occur in the Americas?

I pretty sure this idea may have been proposed, but what if the Megafauna Extinction at the end of the Ice Age didn't occur? This means North America would be populated by various mammoth, tapir, rhino, and big cat species. And more importantly for natives that came to America: peccaries, horses and camels.

How would history be changed? Would we see earlier contact between the continents? Would the exchange between the Old World & the New World be less one sided? What would colonization look like in this scenario?
 
The Lewis and Clark expedition doesn't happen. One of the motivations for that expedition was a belief at he time that species didn't go extinct. So all of the known megafauna fossils were judged to be creatures that must still be alive somewhere in the interior of North America. Lewis and Clark went looking for them, and didn't find them.

So in this timeline Lewis and Clark would remain on the east coast.

(And a billion butterflies just cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.)
 
In my own opinion, I would believe that some sort of lasting or thriving civilizations would emerge as a result of the Megafauna not going extinct. I kind of like the idea that California & cascadia would be ruled by various city-states, that would inter-trade. A city along the Mississippi River would become a Keivan Rus' and gradually becoming an influential economic center. The Great Plains would be ruled by various Hordes that would raid the nations of the Mississippi and south into Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica would be the America's China, a centralized state that would go through various incarnations, as well as being the center for innovation. The southern east coast would be ruled by various nations that would adopt a more feudal society, while the northern east coast would adopt a more Novegradian trade type of society.
 
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/01/what-killed-great-beasts-north-america
Until about 11,000 years ago, mammoths, giant beavers, and other massive mammals roamed North America. Many researchers have blamed their demise on incoming Paleoindians, the first Americans, who allegedly hunted them to extinction. But a new study fingers climate and environmental changes instead. The findings could have implications for conservation strategies, including controversial proposals for “rewilding” lions and elephants into North America.

The idea that humans wiped out North America’s giant mammals, or megafauna, is known as the “overkill hypothesis.” First proposed by geoscientist Paul Martin more than 40 years ago, it was inspired in part by advances in radiocarbon dating, which seemed to indicate an overlap between the arrival of the first humans in North America and the demise of the great mammals. But over the years, a number of archaeologists have challenged the idea on several grounds. For example, some researchers have argued that out of 36 animals that went extinct, only two—the mammoth and the mastodon—show clear signs of having been hunted, such as cuts on their bones made by stone tools. Others have pointed to correlations between the timing of the extinctions and dramatic fluctuations in temperatures as the last ice age came to a halting close.

To get a higher resolution picture of what may have happened, archaeologists Matthew Boulanger and R. Lee Lyman of the University of Missouri, Columbia, decided to look at a region that had not been well studied in the past: the northeast of North America, including the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maine, and the Canadian province of Ontario. “This is a region that has been virtually absent from discussions” about megafaunal extinctions, Boulanger says, which have mostly focused on the Great Plains and the American Southwest. “Yet it is also a region with an incredibly rich record” of prehistoric animal remains. For example, the bones of at least 140 mastodons and 18 mammoths have been found in New York state alone.
 
The Lewis and Clark expedition doesn't happen. One of the motivations for that expedition was a belief at he time that species didn't go extinct. So all of the known megafauna fossils were judged to be creatures that must still be alive somewhere in the interior of North America. Lewis and Clark went looking for them, and didn't find them.

So in this timeline Lewis and Clark would remain on the east coast.

(And a billion butterflies just cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.)
it would still happen... the prime reason they went was simply to find out what was out there and get it solidly down on maps. For too long, everyone was relying on the word of a handful of trappers and explorers on what was out there... with the US purchase of the LA territory, there was a real need to know...
 
For example, some researchers have argued that out of 36 animals that went extinct, only two—the mammoth and the mastodon—show clear signs of having been hunted, such as cuts on their bones made by stone tools. Others have pointed to correlations between the timing of the extinctions and dramatic fluctuations in temperatures as the last ice age came to a halting close.
? isn't there evidence too that assorted ground sloths were hunted and butchered?
 
I pretty sure this idea may have been proposed, but what if the Megafauna Extinction at the end of the Ice Age didn't occur? This means North America would be populated by various mammoth, tapir, rhino, and big cat species. And more importantly for natives that came to America: peccaries, horses and camels.

How would history be changed? Would we see earlier contact between the continents? Would the exchange between the Old World & the New World be less one sided? What would colonization look like in this scenario?

The Spanish are swept into the sea by hordes of Aztec cavalry.
 
. And more importantly for natives that came to America: peccaries, horses and camels.
peccaries are around now, and didn't seem to do the natives any good. The camels are a good bet.. most of the surviving species around now were domesticated. The horses are iffy... some of the species around now were domesticated, some weren't. Still, even getting one of these would definitely be a boon to them...
 
How would history be changed? Would we see earlier contact between the continents?

Oh, definitely. As this is not a "one species avoids extinction" scenario but a "all megafauna avoid extinction" scenario, we are almost definitely going to see this world's version of the Columbian Exchange start to take place around 1000 AD, when the Norse land in the northeast and find ivory. Maybe not a lot, maybe just a few beads or carvings swapped or stolen from the Native Americans, but once they find that they will be back. The entire Norse Greenland economy (well, beyond the subsistence portion) was based off of exporting walrus ivory; mastodon and mammoth ivory will see the Norse stay in the Americas, trading whatever they can for this precious resource. The ivory trade sees exchanges of culture, technology, disease, ideas, plants and animals. Depending on butterflies, there may be some initial colonization attempts that are not followed up on due to the black death reducing demand for land in Europe, giving the Natives some breathing space.

Other potential tradable items for the Vikings include horses, if they find American horses impressive, and potentially wool, assuming that camels and/or shrub ox are both domesticated and can be bred to have wool that is noteably finer than sheep's wool.
 
? isn't there evidence too that assorted ground sloths were hunted and butchered?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...y-show-humans-hunting-giant-sloths-180968900/
New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument is a desolate place; sparse vegetation pokes up throughout its salt flats and white gypsum dunes. But the area wasn’t always a barren landscape. At the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, it was home to the massive Lake Otero. When the water receded, it opened up an area of expansive mudflats—a canvas to record tales of life at the lake.

Researchers recently identified a particularly curious tale: ancient humans tracking a giant sloth. As Ed Yong reports for The Atlantic, scientists spotted a set of giant sloth footprints with human prints nestled inside, suggesting that the ancient people were closely tailing the lumbering beast.

Last year, Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University in the U.K. was excavating a set of the large apostrophe-shaped ground sloth tracks when he noticed a human print within one of them. Upon following the track, he found another double print, and another—eventually uncovering 10 in all.

The tracks suggest the human was following the sloth relatively closely, Yong reports. If the sloth was following the human, its massive footprint would have obliterated the human tracks. Conversely, if the human stepped into the sloth tracks at a later time—after the sloth tracks had dried—it would have left a distinctive pattern.

“It really does look like they were contemporaneous,” Anthony Martin, a trace fossil expert at Emory University tells Yong. “This is a common problem we have with dinosaur tracks: We have something that looks like following behavior, but could have been offset by days or weeks. Here, the humans maybe had the sloth in sight.” The research appears in the journal Science Advances.

The larger question is what, exactly, the stone-age human was doing tracking the beast. Ground sloths were very different from the ugly-cute meme-bait tree sloths we have today. These muscular giants had fierce claws and ranged in size from something akin to a golf cart to the size of an elephant.

If humans actually hunted them, it would have had to be a team effort. In this most recent paper, Bennett and his co-authors suggest just that. While most ground sloth tracks move in fairly straight or curving lines, the track with the human prints zig-zag, which means that the animal may have been trying to avoid hunters. As Yong reports, another set of human prints—which were much fainter, as if the person was moving on tiptoes—approaches from the opposite direction. At the end of the sloth track the sloth prints move in a circle, and there are claw marks on the ground, which the researchers interpret as the sloth rearing up on its hind legs and flailing its claws around.

Bennett’s team interprets the prints as hunting ambush. “While it was being distracted and turning, somebody else would come across and try and deliver the killer blow,” he tells Matthew Stock at Reuters. “It’s an interesting story and it’s all written in the footprints.”


William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College and the American Museum of Natural History tells Laura Geggel at LiveScience that the study is well done, but there are potential alternative explanations. It’s a little odd and seems unnecessary that the pursuer step directly in the sloth prints, which would have required a much wider than normal stride. It could just be a human goofing around. “How many times have children, or even adults, followed in the footsteps of others in the snow or sand, simply for the fun of it?” he asks.

Bennett acknowledges that’s a possibility. “It’s really difficult to rule that out,” he tells Yong. “But I think that’s highly unlikely. These were fearsome animals. They had claws like Wolverine. I wouldn’t have wanted to go head-to-head with one. It would be a very silly risk to take.”

As Sid Perkins at Science reports, the tracks also add to the long debate about whether the mass disappearance of megafauna, including mammoth, giant sloths, sabre-toothed cats, giant armadillos, giant beavers and other huge animals went extinct because of the changing climate or if human hunting pushed them over the edge.

While some researchers doubt that humans with stone-tipped spears could successfully hunt some of these creatures, a 2016 study in Science Advances suggests that the one-two punch of a rapidly changing climate and human hunting pressure ended the age of giants. The new study certainly isn’t conclusive proof of the link, but it at least places humans and megafauna in the same place at the same time.

White Sands may eventually reveal even more interesting interactions. The site contains hundreds of thousands of tracks, Bennett tells Geggel. It is likely the largest palimpsest of human and animal activity found in North America—and perhaps the world.

Editor’s note April 30, 2018: An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated the human footprint was 20 inches long. The human footprints are around 5 inches long while the sloth prints are up to 22 inches long.


Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...g-giant-sloths-180968900/#TjZCDGZiZvVsIhck.99
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not sure about N. America, but S. America seems to have clear evidence of hunting of other megafauna. An (older) book of mine notes that they've found butchered Glyptodon bones, and the notorious Eberhardt Cave (which contained some seemingly fresh Mylodon skin that make some people think the critter was still around) had a Mylodon skin that had been removed from a carcass and rolled up. Unless these finds have been negated by newer evidence, that's proof that other critters besides mammoths and mastodons were hunted...
 
The whole climate change argument is flawed because this has happen hundreds of time before and the species do not go extinct they simply have their range go north but when humans are itrocduced they go extinct and we have sites where we find they kill them
 
Even if humanity didn't cause the extinction of these megafauna IOTL, it doesn't mean they couldn't in an alternate history where the megafauna survived environmental changes. Humanity has obviously consistently wiped out megafauna as they spread. So as long as humans don't go extinct in the Americas in this line, it is still entirely possible if not almost certain that human civilization in the Americas would still have wiped out some if not all of the megafauna species. So while it's possible a few could be domesticated and thus survive, but my bet is the majority still go extinct. Just this time by humanity.
 
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