The relationship between humans and horses in North America was, according to the Bluefish Caves evidence, much longer than the overkill model’s focus on the Clovis period would suggest.

This does not necessarily mean that human hunting played no role in horse extinction.

It means that if hunting was a factor, the relationship was a longer and more complex one than the simple story of a sudden human arrival followed by rapid megafauna extinction can capture.

The ice age horses of Beringia that the Bluefish Caves people were butchering were not the only horses in the Americas — different horse species and populations occupied different parts of North America during the Pleistocene.

The specific relationship between the Beringian horse populations and the broader pattern of horse extinction in North America is a question that the Bluefish Caves evidence raises but does not by itself answer.