Thirteen thousand years ago, over 40 megafauna species, including mammoths and mastodons, disappeared from North America. Paul Martin, a paleoecologist, published a controversial theory that explained what happened to the mammoths and mastodons towards the end of the Pleistocene epoch. Martin wrote that Homo sapiens, the Clovis people, killed off the American megafauna in a span of 1,000 years. Many call Martin’s over-kill theory “Blitzkrieg.” Westerners associate the term with military strikes during World War II. But Blitzkrieg, which means “lightening war,” can also describe a swift and destabilizing attack on the environment.

Scholars, including Martin, agree that the Clovis developed tools to expertly and accurately kill megafauna from a safe distance. Opponents of Blitzkrieg claim that the extinctions took place because of climate change or from diseases brought by nomadic Homo sapiens, crossing over the Bering Strait with their animals. The fact that most plants and small animals survived the Pleistocene epoch suggests that megafauna were easy targets of whoever or whatever brought about their demise. While we may never know with certainty what happened to the mammoths and mastodons, the controversy surrounding Martin’s Blitzkrieg theory proves our unwillingness to accept the significant impact humans have on ecosystems.