Why the Numbers Make the Mammoth Overkill Hypothesis Implausible

At the peak of the late Pleistocene, the global mammoth population is estimated at around 10 million individuals. Multiple studies place the human population of the world at the same period at somewhere between 5 and 10 million people. Randall Carlson takes the larger figure and works through what it actually implies.

Of those 10 million humans, children were not hunting. In most reconstructions of Palaeolithic societies, women were not the primary hunters either. The realistic pool of active hunters was perhaps a couple of million people - spread across the entirety of the inhabited world, pursuing prey across vast landscapes with hand-thrown spears. The idea that this population systematically hunted 10 million mammoths to complete extinction within a couple of thousand years, leaving no viable breeding populations anywhere on a continent the size of North America, simply does not hold up to basic scrutiny. The numbers are not there. Something capable of killing at continental scale and geological speed was responsible - and human hunters, however skilled, were not it.

Join Randall in the field in New York State for his Finger Lakes Tour, Aug 30 Sep 5, 2026