'Like a bomb has gone off': Ancient humans may have set megafires that turned Southern California into an uninhabitable 'wasteland' for 1,000 years

Illustration of bison entrapped in tar pit as wildfires burn.

Ice-age humans may have set megafires in what is now Southern California, making the region uninhabitable for a thousand years, new research suggests.

These massive wildfires may have been a major contributor to the extinction of megafauna in the area, fossils from the La Brea tar pits suggest. The findings were published Aug. 18 in the journal Science.