The thesis has been argued for many decades since the 1960's, when this early volume came out, but it is apparent that the world over, major land fauna have disappeared whenever the old paleo hunting culture entered the scene. Thus giant ground sloths, uintatherium, sabertooth cats and horses departed the American scene nine to eleven thousand years ago, when Folsom Man came with his refined toolkit and pack-animal tactics for bringing down big game.The human-induced megafaunal extinction theory has been in common currency for several decades, but in reality there's very little direct evidence to support it at this time. In fact, the most recent evidence suggests that all the hominids -- from Australopithecus to Homo erectus to modern Homo sapiens -- were and are (with the exception of settled, urban societies) opportunistic hunters at best. Among almost all modern hunter-gatherer groups, hunting does play an extremely significant role ... but it's largely a symbolic one. Wild game -- most frequently killed by men -- has an important religious and social role in most societies, but it is the foods often gathered by women, such as plant foods, fungi, and shellfish, which provide the lion's share of nutrition, including protein, for nearly every hunter-gatherer group (many anthropologists are now proposing that we adjust our terminology and refer to these groups as gatherer-hunters instead). There's every reason to suppose that this general pattern among modern hunter-gatherers or gatherer-hunters extends back to our very origins as a species.
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