# Bringing back mammoths to fight climate change?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bringing-back-mammoths-to-fight-climate-change/933534>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [February 23, 2021, 8:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bringing-back-mammoths-to-fight-climate-change/933534 "2021-02-23T08:02:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 5

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**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\
**Post date:** [March 1, 2021, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bringing-back-mammoths-to-fight-climate-change/933534/81 "2021-03-01T20:49:05Z")

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> [@DrDeth](#):
>
> _Absolutely._ Once we dump the discredited Overkill Hypothesis,

You don’t need to keep bringing up the Overkill Hypothesis. It’s a forty-year-old idea that has been out of date for the past 20 years.

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**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\
**Post date:** [March 1, 2021, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bringing-back-mammoths-to-fight-climate-change/933534/82 "2021-03-01T21:03:27Z")

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> [@Colibri](#):
>
> You don’t need to keep bringing up the Overkill Hypothesis. It’s a forty-year-old idea that has been out of date for the past 20 years.

I think then that the issue is just confusing “overkill” with what the Australian researchers and others are talking about nowadays, that man committed a coup de grace in the past was not overkill, but it left many species dead regardless.

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**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\
**Post date:** [March 1, 2021, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bringing-back-mammoths-to-fight-climate-change/933534/83 "2021-03-01T23:24:18Z")

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> [@GIGObuster](#):
>
> I think then that the issue is just confusing “overkill” with what the Australian researchers and others are talking about nowadays, that man committed a coup de grace in the past was not overkill, but it left many species dead regardless.

The problem is that “overkill” is sometimes used as a synonym for “unsustainable hunting” as in the article you linked to. It really just refers to Martin’s “blitzkrieg” idea of a wave of intensive hunting wiping out the megafauna in a single area in a generation. Long-term lower level hunting, or what was sometimes referred to as “sitzkrieg”, is more likely to have played a role in megafaunal extinctions.

By the way, I heard Martin introduce his ideas in a lecture he gave at the University of Colorado in the late 1970s, I think before he published them. I thought it was a cool idea at the time.

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