Woolly mammoths and other large, lumbering beasts faced extinction long before early humans perfected their skills as spearmakers, scientists say. The prehistoric giants began their precipitous decline nearly 2,000 years before our ancestors turned stone fragments into sophisticated spearpoints at the end of the last ice age.
“Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what weâ??ve found is not consistent with that rapid â??blitzkriegâ?? overkill of large animals,” said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team.