Part 7/9:
Sadly, the story doesn't end well for Australia’s megafauna. By 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, many of these creatures went extinct. The debate over what caused this extinction is ongoing. The "Blitzkrieg" theory posits that early humans rapidly hunted these majestic creatures to extinction within a mere 1,000 years after arriving.
However, other theories advocate that climate change was a critical factor in these extinctions. As the last Ice Age came to an end, changes in temperature and precipitation would have severely impacted available habitats and food sources. Fossil evidence supports the idea that many megafauna had already existed in harsher climates, hinting that the arrival of humans merely coincided with a much larger environmental challenge they could not withstand.