OVERKILL

Hunting megafauna as a specialised activity which provided a large proportion of food for early human population and hunting as a relatively minor component of a broad hunter-gatherer economy. In the first case, the rate of growth of the human population would have depended strongly on the availability of megafauna prey. But the evidence for human hunting of extinct megafauna is slight and, at best, ambiguous. There are no unmistakable ‘kill sites’ with evidence of the systematic slaughter and use of many individuals of the extinct species. Worse still, there is no evidence that Aboriginal people had weapons typically associated with big-mammal hunting during the period that megafauna disappeared. Beforehand it seems that people used only simple wooden implements for hunting. These might have been effective in killing the occasional giant marsupial but seem inadequate to the task of wiping 50 species from a continent.