Question

Read the following passage regarding the debate over Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, then match each researcher to the claim most closely associated with their explicit viewpoint.

The abrupt extinction of most large mammal species (megafauna) at the end of the Pleistocene epoch has long puzzled paleontologists. The traditional consensus, championed most notably by Paul Martin, posits the 'overkill' hypothesis: the sudden arrival of skilled human hunters in the Americas and Australia rapidly decimated naive animal populations. However, paleobotanist Dale Guthrie argues that this view overestimates human hunting capacity and ignores crucial botanical evidence. Guthrie contends that a rapidly changing climate at the end of the last Ice Age replaced highly nutritious, diverse plant communities with lower-quality, uniform vegetation, effectively starving the megafauna. More recently, Ross MacPhee has introduced the 'hyperdisease' hypothesis, suggesting that migrating humans and their accompanying domestic animals introduced highly virulent pathogens to which native megafauna had no immunity. While MacPhee acknowledges the lack of direct fossil evidence for these pathogens, he argues that the speed and lethality of the extinctions better align with a disease model than with human hunting or climate adaptation alone. Meanwhile, biometrician John Alroy challenges Guthrie's skepticism regarding hunting capacity. Alroy's computer simulations demonstrate that even a gradual, low-intensity hunting pressure by humans would have eventually caused population collapse in slow-reproducing megafauna, regardless of climatic conditions.