One minor note that I didn't see mentioned in the comments. Guns, Germs, and Steel, a pop-anthropology/geography/history book that purports to explain how geographic happenstance made white people rule the world, was a New York Times bestseller, and it spends a while expounding the "native peoples killed the megafauna" theory in the first few chapters. I suspect that this is the "theory presently argued in archeology," or at least the pop-culture origin of the idea.
(Incidentally, see here for an anthropologist's critique of the way that the book presents a "sham sort of anti-racism," both factually shaky and ultimately designed to reaffirm white folks in the idea that "the world as we know it is a regrettable inevitability.")
no subject
One minor note that I didn't see mentioned in the comments. Guns, Germs, and Steel, a pop-anthropology/geography/history book that purports to explain how geographic happenstance made white people rule the world, was a New York Times bestseller, and it spends a while expounding the "native peoples killed the megafauna" theory in the first few chapters. I suspect that this is the "theory presently argued in archeology," or at least the pop-culture origin of the idea.
(Incidentally, see here for an anthropologist's critique of the way that the book presents a "sham sort of anti-racism," both factually shaky and ultimately designed to reaffirm white folks in the idea that "the world as we know it is a regrettable inevitability.")