"What Happened to the Mammoths? Exploring the Cause of North America's Most Recent Extinction" by Todd Surovell
Todd Surovell is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Frison Institute at the University of Wyoming. He received his B.S. in Anthropology and Zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona. He is an expert in Paleoindian archaeology, New World colonization, lithic technology, and geoarchaeology. He has worked throughout the Rocky Mountain west and Great Plains. He has also participated in fieldwork in Denmark, Israel, and Mongolia. He has three active field projects, two in Wyoming and one in northern Mongolia.
Abstract: For most of the last two million years, North America was home to more than 40 species of large animals, like mammoths, mastodons, camels, and ground sloths. These megafauna suffered a rapid extinction only 13,000 years ago at a time when the planet’s climate was warming, ecological communities were undergoing significant changes, and humans first appeared on the continent. Disentangling the causes of this mass extinction event has been complicated and contentious to say the least. In this talk, I will provide a personal narrative of my experience with the overkill hypothesis, and how I came to believe that if humans had never migrated to the New World, mammoths would still be roaming the continent today.
PIZZA WITH THE SPEAKER WILL FOLLOW THE LECTURE