I feel like a movie villain after the good guy has fallen into my trap. This is so absurd (to catastrophists), it feels like an April Fool’s Day prank!

The suggestion is as follows:

• Humans migrated to North America
• They slaughtered millions upon millions of mammoths and other megafauna, to extinction (in Siberia there were 150 million mammoths!)
• These beasties were a major source of methane = global warming
• The result was the Younger Dryas cold event, a mini-Ice Age

Of course the alternative explanation, one that does not involve a slaughter not seen outside of the movies – is that the cold snap killed the mammoths, or perhaps the cause of the cold snap (a pole shift or comet/asteroid) killed the mammoths. But that is too obvious, and breaks the unwritten archaeological rule that nature cannot be catastrophic, only man can…

While research into the global cataclysm of roughly 10,000 years ago regularly mentions the extinction of mammoths, it appears that pockets of these giant creatures survived until more recent times.

The core [soil] samples revealed the local Alaskan fauna at the end of the last Ice Age. The oldest sediments, dated to about 11,000 years ago, contain remnant DNA of Arctic hare, bison, and moose; all three animals were also found in higher, more recent layers, as would be expected. But one core, deposited between 10,500 and 7,600 years ago, confirmed the presence of both mammoth and horse DNA.

The team also developed a statistical model to show that mammoth and horse populations would have dwindled to a few hundred individuals by 8,000 years ago.

The range of 7,600 to 10,500 years ago is substantially earlier than the orthodox extinction era of 12,000 years ago. But that date is tied to the faltering ideas of the mammoths suffering from over-hunting, disease or climate change. Some cataclysmic theories are for a more recent period, and consequently this new evidence could potentially be supportive of “alternative” research.