For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.

But new research from several sites is starting to suggest that people came to the Americas earlier — perhaps far earlier — than once thought. These findings hint at a remarkably different life for these early Americans, one in which they may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts.

“There was this idea that humans arrived and killed everything off very quickly — what’s called ‘Pleistocene overkill,'” said Daniel Odess, an archaeologist at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. But new discoveries suggest that “humans were existing alongside these animals for at least 10,000 years, without making them go extinct.”

It’s true. There was a time before the Complete Fucking Assholes showed up.

“Coexisted” with giant sloths and mastodons? Nah, now we’ve just got a better idea of what caused their extinction.

When is the Netflix series please?

I thought this was obvious: avocado seeds are large because they were eaten by giant sloths. It would surely be much more difficult for an avocado tree to reproduce without the involvement of an animal, and giant sloths are not around anymore, so at some point humans must have taken over from the giant sloths, so there was probably some place where humans and giant sloths lived at the same time.

Makes sense. There is evidence that 21k years ago there were people in Argentina eating basically anything that moved

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-tceWbJxIm/

Seems like every 6 months there’s a claim like this that gets media attention and then gets disproven later.

I don’t care either way, just think it’s kinda funny.