1912] Miller: Pacific Coast Avian Palaeontology 109 
to represent the family among the Cathartiformes. How late 
did this great bird persist, and did that important factor, man, 
have anything to do with his disappearance? According to Dr. 
C. Hart Merriam,*? the Me-wah Indians of California have a 
legend concerning a gigantic vulture, Yel-lo-kin, so large that 
he was able to capture the condor and carry him up through a 
hole in the sky. The bird myths of these Indians indicate a close 
acquaintance with the California species. It may be that T'era- 
tornis persisted until the arrival of man upon the scene, and thus 
gave rise to the Mew-wah Indian myth of Yel-lo-kin. 
Granting the possible truth of such an assumption as the con- 
temporaneity of man and Veratornis, the primitive human animal 
could have had but little cause to direct his efforts against the 
large raptorial birds. His meagre offensive armament would 
probably have availed him but little in any event. Thus the 
only influence he would have been likely to exert would be but 
the indirect effect through the extermination of large mammals. 
The possibility of man’s having exerted any such influence on 
the lives of avian species seems remote, in view of the negative 
evidence afforded by the absence thus far of human remains 
from western horizons of undoubted Pleistocene age. 
Direct extermination, or the sharpening of competition, by 
incursions of Old World forms, is a theory without the support 
of any tangible evidence in the case of birds. The procyonids 
and Didelphys are of long standing in America. Felines would 
greatly influence the larger birds by direct attack either upon 
the bird or its nest. It seems highly improbable, then, that 
birds could have been directly influenced by man or the other 
mammals, but that the chief relation of mammals to the large 
birds was in the dependence of the latter upon the former for 
food-supply. 
As has been pointed out in an earlier paper,** the large rap- 
torial birds depended in a dual respect upon the large mammals. 
First, these birds fed upon the bodies of either carnivores or 
herbivores dying of whatever cause; second, the vulture fed upon 
the rejected portion of the carnivore’s kill. Thus, any factor 
41 Merriam, C. H., The Dawn of the World, p. 163, 1910. 
42 Miller, L. H., Univ. Calif. Publ., Bull. Dept. Geol., vol. 6, p. 2, 1910. 
