When humans first appeared in the Americas sometime between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago, many species of large mammals roamed these lands—creatures that now seem like legends. The hairy mastodons with their enormous tusks, the giant ground sloth that stood three times the height of a grown man, the giant bison, majestic animal of the plains, and the saber-toothed tiger all existed in ecological harmony for several million years. In a scant one or two thousand years humans eradicated all of these large mammals from the face of the planet. In Central America nothing larger than the tapir
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