> Both species later became extinct in the Americas. It might sound odd to suggest that the extinction was caused by people. The conventional view is that ther

> Both species later became extinct in the Americas. It might sound odd to suggest that the extinction was caused by people. The conventional view is that there weren't many of them in North America. So how could anything have been hunted to extinction back then? As documented in 1491 by Mann, this view of a sparsely-populated North America prior to Columbus may not be correct. As many as 10x more people might have lived there, wiped out by one European-borne plague after another. Before they went, they had developed sophisticated technologies to change the landscape and surrounding ecosystems to suit them. Given all of this, it's much easier to imagine that the mammoths were indeed hunted to extinction by the inhabitants of North America.