Computer simulations of the extinction of megafauna

Abstract

Computer simulations carried out by Alroy (2001) are examined. Contrary to the claim of their Author, there is no convincing evidence that the extinction of megafauna was caused by humans. Intentionally or unintentionally, attempt was made to force the human-induced extinction of megafauna by assuming an absurdly fast growth of the hypothetical human population in North America. The assumed growth rate was around two-orders of magnitude larger than normally expected. It is well known that the past growth of human population was slow, but in these simulations, the growth of the hypothetical human population was unreasonably fast. However, even under this unreasonable assumption about the growth of human population, computer simulations do not support the postulate of human-assisted extinction of megafauna because there is no clear correlation between the growth of the hypothetical human population and the distributions describing the decline in the population of megafauna.