Just curious, but how much have you actually looked into the distribution of massive accumulations of megafauna remains and other detritus deposited at or near the end of the last glaciation in North America and elsewhere?
In any case, for me, the "hunted to extinction" narrative has a "man made global warming" ring to it.
The “hunted to extinction” theory is actually one of those neat theories that causes cognitive dissonance in PC-people.
It’s PC because it means Man is Evil. Look at how We wiped out so many wonderful creatures! This is the echo of global warming you hear. (Which does not of itself mean it isn’t true.)
OTOH, it would mean the ancestors of today’s Native Americans are the ones who did the wiping out. Which is obviously very much non-PC. There is immense irony in this, if true, because the extinction of the horse (and other potentially domesticable animals) in the Americas was a major contributor to their inability to effectively resist European invasion.
So I enjoy the Progressive types trying to figure out which implication of the “wiped-out” theory should take precedence on the PC-scale.
There are some problems with this mass extinction. The notion that it was entirely non-human related is made a good deal less likely by the fact that many of these animals had survived other cycles of glaciation and ends of the glaciation. Why did this particular one cause the extinction of so many species?
OTOH, the “wipe them out” theory is made less likely because it’s based on the notion that humans first hit the Americas about 12,000 years ago. There is increasing, though not yet really conclusive, evidence that humans have been around here perhaps twice that long. Which would mean that humans lived alongside the megafauna without wiping them out for 10,000 or 12,000 years.
I also find the sheer mechanics of the wipe-out improbable. How many stone-age hunters would it take to cause an extermination across two entire continents? Seems to me it would take many millions, and there just really isn’t evidence of that massive a population being around.
Americans wiped out the buffalo in less than a decade, but we had breech-loading rifles accurate at hundreds of yards. How long would it have taken with spears or even bows?
OTOH, there is that “coincidence” of similar mass extinctions within a century or two of humans reaching multiple other landmasses.
So I think the theory of wipe out is possible, but not conclusively proven.