[maxbond]

Well, the ice age[1] was everywhere right? Our ancestors would've had trouble surviving most anywhere, why not California? It's not that literally nothing grew, otherwise what were the mastadon & other animals in the kill site eating?

Another possibility is that this was another group of hominids, not homo sapiens, and that they did in fact die out.

But honestly I'm not qualified to say much more in the subject than I have, I think it's a fascinating hypothesis & that the evidence that the bones were broken apart by being impacted with stones, in a similar manner to how bones are broken up to extract marrow, is compelling. And that the further isotopic evidence suggesting it was the stones found around the site, rather than construction equipment, is also compelling. But I'm not an archaeologist, and when the debate settles, I'll accept the conclusion they come to.

[1] Not to be pedantic, just to note because I find it fascinating, but the current ice age hasn't ended, this was the "last glacial period". Between ice ages there can be things like palm trees and turtles living at the poles. We're currently in an interglacial period of an ongoing ice age.

[moloch-hai]

Most of the world was not iced over; mainly just higher latitudes like where European geologists come from. People in the tropics experienced big climatic shifts -- green Sahara, Amazon savannah, and the Java Sea, South China Sea, Yellow Sea, and Persian Gulf all lush bottom land -- but mostly not ice.

[kuhewa]

Yeah worth mentioning, to put a fine point on it - geological ice ages are millions of years long and include alternating glacial and interglacial periods. In popular use of the terms, ice ages are those shorter glacial periods.