On the evening of Thursday, Nov. 8, Dr. Donald K. Grayson gave a talk in the Kirner-Johnson Red Pit on "Ice Age Extinctions." Grayson is an archaeologist who has written extensively about the extinction of large mammals like mammoths, giant ground sloths and sabertooth cats in North America during the Pleistocene. Grayson has been at the University of Washington since the mid-1970s, but he began his teaching career at Hamilton, back when the Anthropology Department was part of Kirkland College.
Grayson began the talk, to a full-house, by showing slides of many of the species of "megafauna" that went extinct during the Ice Age. The many children in the audience were fascinated by these. Grayson then addressed the issue of why these animals went extinct. A popular explanation for the extinctions, called the "overkill hypothesis", is that the first human colonists in North America hunted the animals to extinction soon after arriving on the continent. Grayson pointed out, however, that there is very little empirical evidence to support this hypothesis, and he suggested that the main reason why it remains so widely believed has more to do with the concern that people have about the impacts that humans have on the environment than it has to do with scientific evidence.
Grayson's talk was sponsored by the Anthropology Department and the student-run Anthropology Club, and refreshments were provided by Cafe Opus.
