Northeastern North American Pleistocene megafauna chronologically overlapped minimally with Paleoindians Matthew T. Boulanger a, b, * , R. Lee Lyman a a Department of Anthropology,107 Swallow Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA b Archaeometry Laboratory, University of Missouri Research Reactor,1513 Research Park Drive, Columbia, MO 65211, USA article info Article history: Received 8 May 2013 Received in revised form 26 November 2013 Accepted 28 November 2013 Available online Keywords: Extinction Megafauna North America Paleoindian Radiocarbon abstract It has long been argued that specialized big-game-hunting Paleoindians were responsible for the extinction of three dozen large-bodied mammalian genera in North America. In northeastern North America, the overkill hypothesis cannot be tested on the basis of associations of Paleoindian artifacts and remains of extinct mammals because no unequivocal associations are known. The overkill hypothesis requires Paleoindians to be contemporaneous with extinct mammalian taxa and this provides a means to evaluate the hypothesis, but contemporaneity does not confirm overkill. Blitzkrieg may produce evidence of contemporaneity but it may not, rendering it difficult to test. Overkill and Blitzkrieg both require large megafaunal populations. Chronological data, Sporormiella abundance, genetics, and paleoclimatic data suggest megafauna populations declined prior to human colonization and people were only briefly contemporaneous with megafauna. Local Paleoindians may have only delivered the coup de grace to small scattered and isolated populations of megafauna. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction During the late Pleistocene, North America lost 36 genera of mammals, most of them (N ¼ 30) large-bodied (44 kg). Thirty genera went globally extinct, but the remainder survived elsewhere (Grayson, 2011). Paleontologists and archaeologists have debated the causes of these extinctions for decades (Grayson, 1980, 1984a), with purported growing consensus on a single cause an illusion (Barnosky et al., 2004; Grayson, 2006, 2007; Koch and Barnosky, 2006; Surovell, 2008; Ripple and Van Valkenburgh, 2010). The most popular causes are overkill by humans (Wesler, 1981; Fiedel and Haynes, 2004; Martin, 2005; Surovell et al., 2005; Haynes, 2007, 2009; Surovell and Waguespack, 2009) and environmental change of one sort or another (Graham and Lundelius, 1984; Guthrie, 1984; Haynes, 2008; Nogués-Bravo et al., 2010). A hyper- disease has also been suggested as the cause (MacPhee and Marx, 1997), but no known diseases have the properties necessary to wipe out genetically unrelated genera (e.g., Lyons et al., 2004). A recently proposed extraterrestrial impact at 12,900 BP (Firestone et al., 2007) as the cause has been extensively questioned (Buchanan et al., 2008; Marlon et al., 2009; Surovell et al., 2009b; Daulton et al., 2010; Haynes et al., 2010; Pigati et al., 2012), and we do not consider it here. Studies examining the chronologies of Pleistocene extinctions and Paleoindian arrivals into the North American continent have tended to adopt a continent-wide perspective (e.g., Buchanan et al., 2008; Haynes, 2008). Yet, these large-scale studies tend to be biased by the rich paleontological and archaeological records of western North Americadspecifically the Great Plains and American Southwestdrelative to that of eastern North America (Meltzer, 1988; Lepper and Meltzer, 1991). Moreover, although continent- wide studies provide general views of historical events, they diminish resolution and mask details that may have important bearing on regional issues. Just as the history of a fauna can be understood only through the histories of individual species composing that fauna (Grayson, 2007), so too the history of continent-wide extinctions can be understood only through the extinction histories of individual regions (e.g., Lima-Ribeiro and Diniz-Filho, 2013). This issue of scale is commonly acknowledged in modern ecology and evolution (e.g., Landres, 1992; Callicott, 2002; Frankham and Brook, 2004; Berkes, 2006), and we view extinction, regardless of its cause(s), as an ecological and evolu- tionary process. Here, we adopt a fine-scale approach to the question of human involvement in the extinction processes of Pleistocene megafauna in northeastern North America, defined here as the New England * Corresponding author. Department of Anthropology, 107 Swallow Hall, Uni- versity of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA. E-mail addresses: boulangerm@missouri.edu, matthewboulanger@mac.com (M. T. Boulanger). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary Science Reviews journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quascirev 0277-3791/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.11.024 Quaternary Science Reviews 85 (2014) 35e46