The end of the last Ice Age also marked the end for more than three dozen genera of large mammals in North America, from mammoths and mastodons to bison and saber-toothed cats.
The end of the last Ice Age also marked the end for more than three dozen genera of large mammals in North America, from mammoths and mastodons to bison and saber-toothed cats. Details concerning the precise timing and circumstances, however, have remained murky ever since.
A team of scientists that included Texas A&M University archaeologist Dr. Michael Waters recently focused on the well-known Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in southern California in their quest to provide answers to these questions, resulting in the most exact and detailed timeline for the extinctions that happened during the latter part of the Pleistocene period in North America, along with some foreboding insight into the area’s present and future. Their work is featured on the cover of the current issue of Science.
Waters, a distinguished professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans (CSFA), along with roughly a dozen fellow researchers examined the timing and cause of the extinction of a variety of large mammals, known as megafauna, that got stuck in tar at Rancho La Brea, ensuring the preservation of their bones. The team used the radiocarbon dating method to date 169 bones from seven different animals — bison, horse, camel and ground sloths as well as the carnivores that ate them, including the saber-toothed cat, dire wolf and American lion. They also compared those findings to regional pollen and charcoal records along with continent-wide data on human and large mammal populations.
Read more at: Texas A&M University
