saw a show on cable the other day that posited a theory I hadn’t heard before.
The climte change enabled many different species and related members of similar species to wander onto territories where they had not previously existed.
This intermingling esposed them to germs to which they had not previously been exposed, killing whole populations of larger species from disease.
That’s a nice story, but there’s no discernable evidence of a disease in the last mammoths. There is however evidence for sudden extinction. Yes, there were some isolated populations (dwarfed) which persisted until perhaps 2000 years ago, and the Earth can only show one face to the incoming space crud which was found embedded in the tusks of the last North American mammoths. :’)
This is Robert Bakker’s theory in his 1985 book “The Dinosaur Heresies”. Bakker notes that the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period did not occur at once but over a period of several million years.
Bakker speculated that because of continental drift historically isolated populations came into contact and thus succumbed to new diseases.
It’s not surprising that the climate change doomsayers borrowed his theory.