New study on holocene mammal extinction

[auroraglacialis]

There is a new study out regarding the extinction of large mammals after the last ice age. Often this is cited as an example of how human hunters drove species to extinction by overhunting. The study is pretty conclusive in that this was not the cause, but rather that it was a combination of climate change and land use by humans (e.g. agriculture) that brought the demise of some of them, while in other cases human influence could be excluded and in some cases humans even helped mammals.

Humans and climate contributed to extinctions of large Ice Age mammals, new study finds

During the period when these animals were declining, the human population was beginning its boom, and was spreading out across not only the large-bodied mammals' cold-climate habitats, but also across their warm-climate refuges, changing the landscape with agriculture and other activities
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if humans had any impact on musk-ox populations, it may have been to help sustain them
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Although it is clear that climate change drives the dynamics of these species, we, as humans, have to take some of the blame for what happened during this most-recent cycle. It seems that our ancestors were able to change the landscape so dramatically that these animals were effectively cut off from what they needed to survive, even when the human population was small