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The great beasts vanish

13,000 BCE – 10,000 BCE · na-megafauna

Megafauna is the collective term for large land animals, and until around eleven thousand years ago North America had a fauna comparable to Africa's today. Around three-quarters of North American mammals over 44 kilograms disappeared. The debate between overhunting and climate change has run for sixty years, and is probably mis-posed: climate shifted ranges and fragmented populations, and hunting took an already pressed fauna. The consequences are lasting — it is why the Americas met the Old World without draught animals, without the horse and without cattle, an imbalance that shaped everything after 1492.

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