"We know that these large mammals survived for many hundreds of thousands of years and through periods of warming," he said. "The question has been why at this final warming interval...were there so many extinctions?... What this paper does is it sort of ends the debate that there's a single cause."

wait what??
I know that I am slow.
1) these large mammals survived a number of warming periods.
2) these mammals went extinct during this recent warming period.
3) the biggest difference was the presence of humans.
4) humans only caused some of the extinctions.

ok fine
some went naturally extinct because of insufficient genetic diversity.
sure, fine.

but I thought that the deniers were still claiming that all of the extinctions were caused by climate change and none were caused by humans.

FFS
stupid science
just changing things as they go along

namatad: I thought that the deniers were still claiming that all of the extinctions were caused by climate change and none were caused by humans.

? What deniers do you have in mind? I've been reading about this stuff for decades, and I don't remember anyone saying all the extinctions were caused by climate change alone.

What pisses me off about these articles is the oversimplification jargon used for 'pop sci' reporting. Early humans almost certainly did not hunt any megafauna into extinction, or at least it was an extremely rare occurrence. The way paleo- to neolithic humans cause mass extinctions is by setting fires and by preferentially selecting disruptive species.

When humans move into hostile habitats, one of the first and most consistent things they do is start brush fires and forest fires. This simplifies the landscape and tends to drive out or wipe out dangerous animals. It also encourages vegetation that's much easier to eat. Large predators are the most disrupted by this activity, followed by other large animals. Tigers pretty much vanish in the area of a forest fire, but rabbits come right back.

So the humans come down from the hills and start fires. They come back when the fires burn out. They repeat this. Over just a few generations, it's a huge extinction engine.

Meanwhile, they also encourage certain species, even without proper domestication -- coyotes and dogs are preferable to wolves, antelope are preferable to buffalo, rabbits benefit from the fires, and etc. The species that are encouraged (intentionally or as a mere by-product of the fires, etc) have a huge advantage to out-compete the non-preferred animals.

Bulldozers are used to destroy the Amazon rain forest today, but the fires that are also used to clear the land there are a human technology tens of thousands of years old. There are hundreds of known large-scale historical cases as well, from the recent past to the aborigine conquest of Australia. This exact process continues today. It's not very mysterious.

Yep. Exactly. When fire is the ten most awesome tools you have . . . yeah, you're going to burn a lot of things. A LOT OF THINGS.