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Archaeological studies of temporal changes in human predation strategy using foraging theory tend to focus on the role of overexploitation of important prey resources and resulting resource depression. An alternative use of the prey- choice model framed under foraging theory is to investigate the influence of environmental changes, such as increases in climate stress, on prey availability. Environmental change can be expected to produce many of the same effects on human predation strategy as resource depression. Here analytical techniques typically used to study the effects of over-predation and resource depression caused by humans are used to monitor their response to fluctuations in prey availability related to climate change during the Holocene in Missouri. Data and interpretations presented here add to the growing body of zooarchaeological foraging theory literature implicating environmental change as a critical factor in human diet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conservation agenda to re-wild North America may or may not be realistic in terms of political ecology. However, it represents a real conservation recommendation to re-wild North America with the extant megafauna most closely related to those that became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. The recommendation is based on the presumption that society bears an ethical responsibility to re-wild because humans caused the extinctions. However, the extent to which Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions were the result of overkill is hotly debated. As a result, the ethical imperative for North American re-wilding should be questioned. It will not be questioned unless members of the conservation community read the extensive archaeological and geological literature concerning the North American Pleistocene extinctions. Overlooking the assumptions underlying this particular recommendation is costly to conservation science and to archaeology because it represents an over-simplified, unwieldy and troubling fusion of the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]