The question of "what killed the megafauna in the late Pleistocene?" is a hot topic in human-environmental research. Did humans hunt megafauna like mammoths to extinction (overkill)? Or was their extinction due to climate change? Disease? A combination of these factors? Archaeologists and ecologists hold diverse views on how the extinctions played out.

Dr. Lisa Nagaoaka, a zooarchaeologist and professor in the Department of Geography at UNT, examines the epistemology of research on megafaunal extinctions and the impact that the overkill model, in particular, has had on conservation rhetoric. In 2012, she published a book chapter on the topic. More recently, Science Now asked Dr. Nagaoka to comment on recent findings suggesting that humans did not push the megafauna to extinction in the northeastern U.S. You can follow that story here, http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/01/what-killed-great-beasts-north-america

For more information about Dr. Nagaoka and her research, you can visit http://nagaoka.weebly.com

Nagaoka, L. 2012. The overkill hypothesis and conservation biology. In Conservation Biology and Applied Zooarchaeology by S. Wolverton and R. Lee Lyman (editors), University of Arizona Press.