Paul S. Martin

Paul S. Martin (born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1928 - died in Tucson, Arizona September 13, 2010) was an American geoscientist at the University of Arizona who developed the theory that the Pleistocene extinction of large mammals worldwide was caused by overhunting by humans. Martin's work bridged the fields of ecology, anthropology, geosciences, and paleontology.

In 1953, Martin received his bachelor's degree in zoology from Cornell University. In 1953 and 1956 he completed his master's and doctorate programs at the University of Michigan and then proceeded with postdoctoral research at the Yale University and the University of Montreal. He joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1957 and worked there until his retirement in 1989. A case of polio, contracted while doing undergraduate field work in Mexico, forced Martin to rely on a cane, which restricted but did not end his field work.

Martin developed the theory known as “overkill” or the “blitzkrieg model” based on the ideas of a Russian climatologist Mikhaill I. Budyko about the sudden demise of large Ice Age mammal populations on different continents and at different times coincided with the arrival of humans. He believed that as they migrated from Africa and Eurasia to Australia, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific, humans rapidly hunted the large animals endemic to each continent to extinction. Martin particularly focused his research on North America, whose late Ice Age fauna rivaled that of Africa today., but the ideas was first developed by M. Budyko to explain Mammoth extinction in Europe and Asia. Because M.I. Budyko published his work in a Russian journal and during the cold war in 1967, most North American scholars ignored Budyko's paper.

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