How To Fight An Academic - Mass Extinction - Episode 038

The discussion of ideas and theoreis is integral to developing and generating new ideas - most of the time this is done in conferences and by reviewing journals. However occasionally some papers are written about the same topic but take completely different angles to the same problem. There was a mass exticntion event at the end of the Late Pleistocene in modern day America - where a number of large mammals died off rather rapidly. The three papers examine to what extent, humans, climate change and an impact from outer space may have caused this event to happen.

References

• Firestone, 2007. Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. PNAS, 104(41), pp. 16016-16021.
• Haynes, G., 2002. The catastrophic extinction of North American mammoths and madtodonts. World Archaeology, 33(3), pp. 391-416.
• Grayson, D. K. & Meltzer, D. J., 2003. A requiem for North American overkill. Archaeological Science, Volume 30, pp. 585-593.