One million years ago, proboscideans occupied most of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Today, wild elephants are only found in portions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Although the causes of global Pleistocene extinctions in the order Proboscidea remain unresolved, the most common explanations involve climatic change and͞or human hunting. In this report, we test the overkill and climate-change hypotheses by using global archaeological spatiotemporal patterning in proboscidean kill͞scav-enge sites. Spanning Ϸ1.8 million years, the archaeological record of human subsistence exploitation of proboscideans is preferentially located on the edges of the human geographic range. This finding is commensurate with global overkill, suggesting that prehistoric human range expansion resulted in localized extinction events. In the present and the past, proboscideans have survived in refugia that are largely inaccessible to human populations.archaeology ͉ Pleistocene extinctions ͉ proboscideans P roponents of the overkill hypothesis argue that the global rash of large mammal extinctions that occurred during the Quaternary can be explained by a single factor: the arrival of a novel and efficient predator to new regions, that predator being prehistoric humans armed with a Stone Age hunting technology (1-3). This hypothesis is a difficult one to test and one that has often hinged on the relative timing of two events: (i) the local arrival of Homo and (ii) the local extinction of Pleistocene fauna. But even in the New World, where for more than a half-century the near synchrony of these two events has been known, the causes of Pleistocene extinctions remain unresolved (1-8). Confounding simple explanation in the New World case is the similar timing of a third event, the onset of the Younger Dryas stadial, a sharp reversal to glacial climate that coincides with New World large mammal extinctions (9).If mammalian Pleistocene extinctions resulted from human overkill as humans expanded their range across the globe, now extinct large mammals should have experienced complementary range contractions. As simple as this prediction is, it is far from simple to test, because it could require precisely dating the first appearance of humans and the last appearance of extinct mammals across the globe. Although the timing of Late Pleistocene extinctions is fairly well known for some species in some parts of Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas (5, 10-14), the timing of extinction events predating 40-50 ka (thousand years B.P.) (the effective temporal limit of 14 C dating) are less well known. However, we argue that by using only spatiotemporal patterning in archaeological sites demonstrating the spatiotemporal contemporaneity of humans and extinct fauna, it is possible to test the overkill and climate hypotheses without knowing the precise timing of extinction events.The overkill and climate-change hypotheses can be expressed as two simple alternative scenarios to illustrate this point (Fig. 1). Consider a predator and prey in a...

Traditionally, hunter-gatherers of the Clovis period have been characterized as specialized hunters of large terrestrial mammals. Recent critiques have attempted to upend this position both empirically and theoretically, alternatively favoring a more generalized foraging economy. In this paper, the distinction between subsistence specialists and generalists is framed in terms of forager selectivity with regards to hunted prey, following a behavioral ecological framework. Faunal data are compiled from 33 Clovis sites and used to test the two alternative diet-breadth hypotheses. The data support the older “Clovis as specialist” model, although some use of small game is apparent. Furthermore, data from modern hunter-gatherers are marshaled to support the theoretical plausibility of specialized large-mammal hunting across North America during the Late Pleistocene.

I use cross‐cultural ethnographic data to explore the relationship between male and female subsistence labor among hunter‐gatherer populations by examining data regarding resource procurement, time allocation, and task differentiation between the sexes relative to dependence on hunted foods. The findings indicate that female foragers generally perform a variety of nonsubsistence collection activities and preferentially procure high‐return resources in hunting‐based economies. I develop ideas about predictable relationships concerning the amount of time female foragers expend on subsistence and technological tasks relative to the dietary contribution of meat. I then use ethnographic trends to evaluate archaeological assumptions regarding the sexual division of labor in prehistoric foraging contexts, focusing on the dichotomous views of Clovis labor organization. I argue that archaeological interpretations of prehistoric labor roles in hunting‐based foraging societies are commonly polarized between stereotypical views of male and female subsistence behaviors. I develop an interpretation of Early Paleoindian labor organization, emphasizing female labor in the production of material goods and the procurement of low‐risk plant and animal resources based on global economic trends among foragers.

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