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Climate Is Cited as Key to Extinctions

New evidence from Canada and Alaska suggests that climate change, rather than human hunting, may have played the key role in a great die-off of mammoths, horses and other large North American mammals that began more than 10,000 years ago.

"It was a special time of greater warmth and moisture," said paleoecologist R. Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "The arid steppe receded, the short grass became more lush, and then the forest came in. The mammoth, and the horses, which did well when it was cold, didn't survive."

Read entire article at Wa Po