These staggering losses, involving the violent obliteration of more than forty million animals, were not spread out evenly over the whole period; on the contrary, the vast majority of the extinctions occurred in just two thousand years, between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC.5 To put this in perspective, during the previous 300,000 years only about twenty genera had disappeared.6 The same pattern of late and massive extinctions was repeated across Europe and Asia. Even far-off Australia was not exempt, losing perhaps nineteen genera of large vertebrates, not all of them mammals, in a relatively short
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