North America’s giant Ice Age mammals vanished mysteriously 13,000 years ago. While human hunters were long considered the culprits, the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles are telling a different story. New evidence suggests a devastating combination of rapid climate change and widespread, human-caused wildfires that reshaped the continent and sealed the fate of the megafauna.
- ancient wildfires
- asphalt fossils
- biodiversity crisis
- chaparral ecosystem
- charcoal record
- climate change
- Colombian mammoth
- dire wolf
- Emily Lindsey
- fossils
- giant ground sloth
- Human Footprint PBS
- human impact
- Ice Age animals
- La Brea Tar Pits
- mass extinction
- megafauna extinction
- North American megafauna
- overkill hypothesis
- paleontology
- Paul Martin
- pbs terra
- Pleistocene
- prehistoric Los Angeles
- radiocarbon dating
- saber-toothed cat
- sediment cores
- what happened to megafauna
- youtube
