2/8. Clovis Culture and the American Extinction: Early Humans as Ecological Simplifiers — Dan Flores — The Clovis culture, emerging approximately 13,000 years ago, rapidly spread across North America in a remarkably brief timeframe. Flores connects the Clovis expansion to the "American extinction," wherein large megafauna including mammoths disappeared with striking rapidity. Flores explains that emerging scientific consensus attributes this ecological simplification to humans functioning as novel apex predators, potentially engaging in surplus killing behavior and inducing genomic isolation within animal populations, effectively severing breeding populations and accelerating extinction processes.