Paul S. Martin

Paul S. Martin was a prominent American geoscientist and paleoecologist who lived from 1928 to 2010. He was closely associated with the University of Arizona's Desert Laboratory, where he conducted groundbreaking research on prehistoric environments.

He is most famous for developing the overkill hypothesis, which posits that rapid human hunting caused the sudden extinction of late Pleistocene megafauna. He argued that Paleo-Indians, upon arriving in the Americas, hunted massive animals like mammoths and giant sloths to extinction.

Much of his foundational research was conducted at the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill in Tucson, Arizona. There, he studied ancient plant remains to reconstruct past climates in the American Southwest.

While highly influential, his hypothesis remains a subject of intense debate in the scientific community. Many paleontologists argue that climate change at the end of the last Ice Age played an equal or greater role in the extinction of North American megafauna.