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The extinction of the woolly mammoth, a species that roamed the Earth during the Pleistocene, has long been attributed to human hunting. This theory, known as the 'overkill hypothesis,' suggests that early humans, migrating into new territories, hunted mammoths to extinction. Three main lines of evidence support this view. First, archaeological sites across North America and Eurasia contain mammoth bones with cut marks and embedded spear points, indicating that humans actively hunted these animals. Second, the timing of mammoth extinctions correlates with human arrival in various regions—for example, in North America, mammoths disappeared around 13,000 years ago, shortly after the Clovis people appeared. Third, modern ecological studies show that large-bodied animals, like elephants, are particularly vulnerable to hunting pressure due to their slow reproductive rates, making them easy targets for overexploitation. Together, these points suggest that human predation was the primary driver of mammoth extinction.

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While the overkill hypothesis is compelling, recent evidence challenges each of its claims. First, the cut marks on mammoth bones may not indicate hunting but rather scavenging. Early humans likely took advantage of carcasses that had already died from natural causes, such as starvation or disease, which is a common behavior among modern hunter-gatherers. Second, the correlation between human arrival and extinction is not as clear-cut as proponents claim. In some regions, such as Wrangel Island in the Arctic, mammoths survived for thousands of years after humans arrived, suggesting that other factors were at play. Third, the vulnerability of large animals to hunting is not unique to mammoths; many large species with slow reproductive rates, like elephants, coexist with human hunters for millennia without going extinct. Instead, climate change may have been the decisive factor. As the Earth warmed at the end of the Pleistocene, mammoth habitats—cold, grassy steppes—shrank dramatically, fragmenting populations and reducing their food supply. Paleoclimate data show that these habitat changes coincided with extinction events, even in areas where human presence was minimal. Thus, the evidence points to climate, not hunting, as the primary cause of mammoth extinction.