Early Americans may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts, research shows.
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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