Ron Hoggan wrote:
>
>
> About the time that grain agriculture was getting started in the Fertile
> Crescent, most of the large mammals that had been roaming through Europe
> were endangered or newly extinct. There is good evidence to suggest that
> pre-agricultural humans hunted them to extinction. Pre-agricultural humans
> had larger brains than we do, and they probably needed them to be able to
> kill the enormous herbivores of their time.  The assumption that humans are
> merely stupid brutes may have some merit. I think it is pretty stupid to
> destroy your own food supply --- and we haven't stopped doing that.
> (desertification, genetic modification, feed lots, feeding meat to cows,
> etc., etc.) Maybe we are still stupid brutes? :-)
>
>   
That's from the steady state theory, where nothing other than man could 
have caused extinction.
There is also abundant evidence that Velikovsky's cataclysmic theory is 
correct, supported by the wooly mammoths found in Siberia, the bones and 
ivory found on islands north of there, etc.
So the neolithic might have been a desperate and intelligent response to 
a sudden scarcity of previously plentiful game.

William