Why it is easier to date Quaternary extinctions than human colonizations under conditions of overkill

Faunal extinctions correlate with human colonization worldwide during the Quaternary, yet the extent to which human hunting drove these losses remains debated. Resolving these debates depends on accurately dating both human arrival and animal extinction events. Herein I present a simulated overkill scenario modeling interaction between a founding human population and a single prey species. The simulation evaluates expected age offsets, the differences between the actual and observed dates, for extinction and colonization as functions of sample size and human population growth rate. Results show that when extinction is driven by human hunting, age offsets for extinction are expected to be smaller than those for colonization. This difference in age offset is expected because overkill produces a rapid demographic collapse of prey populations and taphonomic processes concentrate late-surviving individuals in the fossil record. In contrast, colonization dates are more offset because human populations are smallest immediately after arrival, and archaeological rarity is compounded by taphonomic effects. Although colonization age offsets are consistently larger than extinction age offsets across sample sizes, they are not extreme, such that archaeological sites should be detectable within five centuries of initial human settlement under modest rates of human population growth.