Overkill hypothesis

The correlation between extinction of fauna and the arrival of humans to North-America could be seen as the evidence of a causal link[@martin1966Africa and Pleistocene Overkill].

The Pleistocene extinctions are temporally correlated to the arrival of modern humans, and there is evidence of extinctions in Africa during the same time-period.

However, not all hominins drove extinctions in islands, which cast some doubts regarding the validity of the overkill extinction across the board. One possibility is that overkill is a result of cultural changes that appeared later in time and not an intrinsic characteristic of humans.