New findings hint that early Americans may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts.
Sloths weren’t always slow-moving, furry tree-dwellers. Their prehistoric ancestors were huge — up to 4 tons — and when startled, they brandished immense claws.For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.
“It was a nice story for a while, when all the timing lined up,” said paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner at the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program. “But it doesn’t really work so well anymore.
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