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A few thoughts.

First, humans have been very effective at wiping out large, dangerous animals in many other circumstances. Everywhere we show up, whether it is Northern Europe, the Americas, or Australia, most of the large, dangerous animals die off shortly thereafter. I doubt that is a coincidence. The example of the buffalo is flawed because they were not very dangerous to humans, and because the sheer size of the buffalo population was massive compared to the amount of mammoths that could be supported in a similar sized region. I’d guess we’re talking on the order of thousands to one.

Your argument about the effectiveness of hunting large vs small prey is based on false assumptions. Small prey is faster and more elusive than large prey. It takes more time to hunt them, better technology and skill to effectively kill them, and they provide only a small amount of protein for the effort. Humans weigh the calculus of all this, and usually take down the biggest prey they can manage, to get the greatest return on investment. For example, Eskimos subsist on whale meat, not on seals or fish, even though they would seem to be the easier targets. Same thing with your example of the buffalo. Hunting rabbits or deer might seem easier than going after buffalo with spears or bow and arrow, yet we had whole societies of humans who decided to get most of their meat from following the buffalo herds.

Also, look at the example of other top tier predators like lions. They’ll kill anything they can to satisfy their massive need for protein, but their hunting behavior is quite different for large and small prey. They’ll stalk a herd of gazelles or antelope they come across, to get a quick meal, but they are lucky to grab one of them, and that meat will satisfy the needs of the pride for only a very short time. When they encounter a giraffe, on the other hand, they will herd the beast to a battleground where they can gain the upper hand, and then spend hours in mortal combat with it, taking much greater risks, in order to secure a much larger meal that can provide them food for days.

I agree that humans can be effective at wiping out species, but that is a relatively recent event.

Guns or poisons, it’s up to you.

I’m certainly not claiming that man never took a mammoth, there is plenty of irrefutable evidence he did.

What I am saying is that it was probably a rare event. A much more frequent event would have been half, if not more, of the hunting party being ripped to shreds, the tribe losing their strongest and bravest hunters. The cost of a mammoth kill would have been simply enormous.

Consider also that there were quite a number of species that went extinct at the same time, also that there were islands off of Northern Siberia that had quite large mammoth populations, islands that were not inhabited by men. Mammoths disappeared from those places as well.

ALTHOUGH!!
There have been infrequent references to people in the early 1900’s having mammoth sightings in various places, so it’s certainly possible that a small indigent population still exists somewhere.

The example of the buffalo is flawed because they were not very dangerous to humans, and because the sheer size of the buffalo population was massive compared to the amount of mammoths that could be supported in a similar sized region. I’d guess we’re talking on the order of thousands to one.

I doubt that a mammoth ate a thousand times more than a buffalo or that buffalo are not dangerous. Modern bison are very dangerous. But what happened to the Ice Age Bison and where did the modern Bison come from?

Bison Latifrons is an extinct Bison that had a huge horn span measuring 7 to 8 feet (2.5M) long tip to tip. The Florida fossil vertebrate giant measured 8.5 feet (2.5M) at the shoulder and survived through the last Ice Age.

This Giant Prehistoric Buffalo appeared, in Florida, during the middle Pleistocene period about 500,000 years ago. From the Bovidae Family, of even toed Artiodactyls, these long-horned Bison went extinct 21,000-30,000 years ago. This large wide-horned Bison was the largest of the North American species, of Bison.