The rapid expansion of human populations across the Americas, combined with the hunting pressure they exerted, is proposed to have driven the megafauna to extinction in a period of a few thousand years.

Most current researchers favor a combination of these two factors — climate change and human hunting — as the explanation for the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, with the relative importance of each factor varying across different species and different geographic areas.

The Bluefish Caves evidence is relevant to this debate because it pushes the date of human-horse interaction in North America to approximately 24,000 years ago — a date significantly earlier than the proposed Clovis overkill period of 13,000 to 14,000 years ago.

If people were hunting or scavenging horses in eastern Beringia 24,000 years ago, and if horses persisted in North America until approximately 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, then the extinction of North American horses cannot be attributed solely to the brief period of Clovis hunting pressure.