[Our modern day] Sloths are tree-dwelling tropical mammals of Central and South America. They live in the rainforest canopy and are known for their slow and deliberate movements.
Sloths are mysterious and unusual animals that scientists still know very little about. They have many adaptations that make them unique among mammals; they have a very efficient metabolism that is excellent at conserving energy, they are masters of disguise that can fool all the senses of their predators, and they are the slowest moving mammals on the planet: a sloth at top speed can cover only 1 meter in 1.5 seconds. That is only 1.5 miles per hour!
In most languages the name for “sloth” is equivalent to some form of slowness, lateness, indolence, or laziness, leading to centuries of stereotyping sloths as creatures lacking in motivation.
Insert something stating that they differ in many ways from their ancestors.
Giant ground sloths were large, lumbering beasts that lived in the
Americas during the Ice Age. They were directly related to today's
modern sloths. They were also distantly related to anteaters and armadillos.
The six modern species of sloths are all arboreal, so they are called tree sloths. These sloths are small-bodied and weigh less than 20 pounds. Many of their extinct relatives were much larger and lived on the ground. Because of this, they are referred to as ground sloths.
Giant ground sloths preferred forests along rivers or lakes, but they also lived during the Pleistocene period, also known as the Great Ice Age. At its peak, as much as 30 percent of the Earth's surface was covered by glaciers and parts of the northern oceans were frozen, according to the San Diego Natural History Museum. This made for a very cold environment that few animals could endure.
An international team of scientists has found evidence of an interaction between Ice Age humans and now-extinct giant ground sloths.​
The team found and analyzed fossilized footprints of ancient humans — adults and children — at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico; and those human footprints were actually inside footprints of a giant, razor-clawed ground sloth (Nothrotheriops or Paramylodon sp.).
Behavioral inferences from these trackways indicate prey selection and suggest that humans were harassing, stalking, and/or hunting the now-extinct giant ground sloth in the terminal Pleistocene.​
During a time of climate change, predation (successful or not) may have contributed to the sloth’s extinction in North America.
Early humans made jewelry from giant sloth bones
Early humans living in South America carved giant sloth bones into decorative ornaments that may have been worn as jewellery. The discovery also provides new evidence that people arrived in central Brazil during or before the end of the last glacial period.
The bones were shaped by people using stone tools before they were fossilized...
The Santa Elina rock shelter (Mato Grosso State, Brazil) displays a rock panel rich in paintings, including anthropomorphs (e.g. ‘men with ornaments’),...
...The rich and diverse archaeological assemblage of Santa Elina includes human-made limestone flakes bearing micro-retouch, calcite flakes, and quartz and silex items, some of which could have been used by humans to perform bone surface alterations...
...​Here we provide evidence that three giant ground sloth osteoderms were anthropogenically modified. The presence of several marks from human modification, including drilled perforations, polishing, multi-directional scratches and use-wear traces suggests their anthropic nature and extensive use. We document smoothing of the surface; traces of stone tool interaction with bone, including incisions and scars, scraping marks, scratches, percussion notches; polish and gloss; use-wear smoothing of the rim and the attachment systems; and animal-inflicted modifications on the three osteoderms
