It’s bizarre to me that hunting is the “regular suspect” in so many imaginations of the far past when the diseases transported by humans and their animals was almost certainly as substantial a factor in the far past as it was more recently.
Not so much diseases from animals brought by humans, but rather diseases/parasites from related animals who just mosied onto and sometimes over Beringia of their own accord.
E.g., wooly mammoths on the Eurasian steppes and American mastodons spent a lot of time developing in isolation, they could've had their own diseases they'd evolved to resist, then Beringia arises from the seas, and 100 years later, a mastodon catches the Mammmoth-flu or something.
From what little I understand, some of the N. American megafauna have been shown to have limited genetic diversity due to small founder populations, which we know can increase the vulnerability of a population to a novel disease.
I'm wondering how you'd be able to prove or disprove this though, maybe coprolites? Googling this briefly turned up this amazing website with the even more amazing tagline "#1 for fossilized #2"...
Brb doing a PhD in paleoepizootiology.
All of which we know today are vectors for the spread of disease.
I have zero expertise to comment on what a primary contributor to population declines might’ve been for any given animal, I just find it fascinating (and baffling) that those who are experts seemingly ignore something that is undoubtedly a contributing factor.
As others point out this is of course understandable, because the story is less compelling. The image of humans with spears tracking down the last wild beast is one imaginations can’t resist. The image of slowly dying and decaying beasts, less so.