The climate hypothesis proposes that the environmental changes of the late Pleistocene — the warming, the changes in vegetation communities, the loss of the specific habitats that supported megafaunal populations — were the primary drivers of extinction, with human hunting playing a secondary or exacerbating role.

The Manis evidence is not by itself sufficient to resolve this debate.

It documents one specific hunting event approximately 13,900 years ago.

It does not tell us the frequency of mastodon hunting, the size of the human population that engaged in it, or the overall hunting pressure on mastodon populations across the Pacific Northwest.

What it does do is confirm that humans were hunting mastodons in the Pacific Northwest during the period when the extinctions were occurring — before the Clovis horizon, during the late Pleistocene, at a time when the mastodon population was still substantial but already under pressure from a changing climate.

The Manis event is one data point in what must have been a much longer history of human-mastodon interactions in the Pacific Northwest, most of which left no surviving physical evidence.