[merak]

What nonsense. Walking five miles a day isn't all that hard, and that's enough to cross the continent in two years. The paleoIndians had generations - you think they were amputees or something?

We're talking about wanting to exterminate a whole species of animal off of North America. Now, it would be one thing if Indian ancestors had ever spread out the way we do and occupied every square inch of the teritory, but they didn't do that. They lived in little bands.

Suppose that I get together with 200 people who hate turtles and devise a plan to eliminate turtles from North America. By your reckoning I and my band could walk across North Amrica killing every turtle we see in about two years, but is that going to get the job done? Won't the turtles just repopulate the areas we pass through as soon as we're gone?

[Burkeman1]

Not like that. There were bands of 20 too 200 hundred humans hunting for a couple of thousand of years. They drove mega fauna over cliffs or killed them in controlled burns. That human existence all over the world coincideds with the extinctin of megas fauna should end the debate.