An interesting nugget from my biogeography textbook is that the megafauna of Africa are the only population that survived to the present. Every continent except Antarctica had a robust population of megafana about 50,000 years ago. And this is why Africa is most fascinating today for being the only continent with such a rich diversity of large species.
The last ice age cannot account for this variance. What we see in the paleobiological record is a gradual extinction of megafauna on all continents where humans migrated. The record shows simultaneous extinction events with the arrival of human migrants no matter what time period. The reason they did not go extinct in Africa is that they evolved along with humans adapting to their threats for ages. Once humans left Africa and decided to migrate- a relatively fast process that coincided with glacial retreat- all the megafauna that weren't adapted to our intense hunting skills became ambushed into extinction.
Africa is the great preserver of megaffauna ancestry. Elephants, lions, tigers, rhinos... They all had sister species on other continents who proved themselves vulnerable to the human diaspora.
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