It’s not recent at all. We’ve been wiping out species from the start. Man colonized Australia a long time ago, and all those species didn’t die at the same time because they caught the flu from us!
If you think that man hunted mammoths incompetently and often got himself killed, I have to ask what you are smoking. That’s just not how men operate. If we want to do something, we will figure out the most efficient and least dangerous way to accomplish it, and once we have, we’ll just follow that procedure from that point on. So, when we first started hunting mammoths, yes, a lot of people probably got gored and trampled. Once we figured out the right method, then we’d follow that procedure and be taking down mammoths with near impunity just like every other animal that we set about to hunt. If we couldn’t figure out an efficient procedure, then there wouldn’t be much evidence of us hunting them, since we would have avoided it whenever we possibly could. People just aren’t suicidal or stupid, and we are talking about people, despite the popular conception of dumb “cavemen”.
“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.”
The mammoths on the isolated islands without men lasted much longer than any others! They survived longer precisely because we were not hunting them.
One of the drawings is about how to hunt a bear ~ first you put on your ski's. You walk up hill ahead of the bear ~ the bear follows you to the top. Then, you start skiing downhill ~ the bear follows ~ you are much faster (65 mph on your skis) .
You get to the bottom first, turn around, stand your ground with your long spear in both hands tight, and the bear slides right down hill onto your spear!
I think they estimate that one at least 5000 year old ~ but it could easily be even older. These drawings have been exposed to weathering for centuries.
The cold hard facts are the Sa'ami exterminated the bears on the Scandinavian peninsula a very long time ago.