Prompt: Analyze how the two authors differ in their explanation of how the woolly mammoth went extinct. Cite evidence from both authors in your response. Make a statement to show what you are writing about or restate the question. How does Paul S. Martin explain the extinction of the woolly mammoth? What evidence from the text shows this? How does Edwin H. Colbert explain the extinction of the woolly mammoth? What evidence from the text shows this? How are these explanations different? Explain what they disagree about and why they disagree. Show your thinking from your analysis of the text. Write a conclusion sentence to restate your main point or summarize what you wrote.
What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?
Paul S. Martin
About 10,000 years ago, as glaciers retreated into Canada and as man moved southward at the end of the last Ice Age, North America suddenly and strangely lost most of its large animals. Native North American mammals exceeding 100 pounds in adult body weight were reduced by roughly 70 percent. The casualty list includes mammoths, mastodon, many species of horses and camels, . . . the giant beaver, tapirs and others totaling over 100 species. Despite this fantastic loss of large animals during the Pleistocene, . . . the fossil record shows no loss of small vertebrates, plants, aquatic organisms, or marine life.
. . . My own hypothesis is that man, and man alone, was responsible for the unique wave of Late Pleistocene extinction. . . . About 12,000 years ago, when the Paleo-Indians swept into North America across the Bering bridge . . . we can be confident that they were old hands at hunting woolly mammoths and other large Eurasian mammals. In contrast, the New World mammoth and other species of big game had never encountered man and were unprepared for escaping the strange two-legged creature who used fire and stone-tipped spears to hunt them in communal bands.
Edwin H. Colbert
Then at the end of the Ice Age, when the last of the great continental glaciers was retreating. . . there was a relatively sudden and wide-spread extinction of mammoths throughout the world. The woolly mammoth disappeared from northern Europe, Asia, and North America, as did the more southerly types in these continents. . . .
What was the reason for the wiping out of the mammoths? Why should these huge and seemingly successful animals suddenly disappear from a scene which they had so long dominated? Was man concerned with their extinction? It hardly seems probable, for even though at this late date he was a clever and an efficient hunter, he was still rather scattered-certainly not a numerous member of the faunas to which he belonged. Therefore, it is difficult to see how primitive hunters might have prevailed against the mammoths to such an extent as to cause their sudden and almost complete destruction.
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