In 1675, Louis XIV established the Parisian seamstresses' guild, the first independent all-female guild created in over 200 years. Guild members could make and sell women's and children's clothing, but were prohibited from producing men's clothing or dresses for court women. Tailors resented the ascension of seamstresses to guild status; seamstresses, meanwhile, were impatient with the remaining restrictions on their right to clothe women.

    The conflict between the guilds was not purely economic, however. A 1675 police report indicated that since so many seamstresses were already working illegally, the tailors were unlikely to suffer additional economic damage because of the seamstresses' incorporation. Moreover, guild membership held very different meanings for tailors and seamstresses. To the tailors, their status as guild members overlapped with their role as heads of household, and entitled them to employ as seamstresses female family members who did not marry outside the trade. The seamstresses, however, viewed guild membership as a mark of independence from the patriarchal family. Their guild was composed not of family units but of individual women who enjoyed unusual legal and economic privileges. At the conflict's center was the issue of whether tailors' female relatives should be identified as family members protected by the tailors' guild or as individuals under the jurisdiction of the seamstresses' guild.

    According to a theory advanced by researcher Paul Martin, the wave of species extinctions that occurred in North America about 11,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene era, can be directly attributed to the arrival of humans, i.e., the Paleoindians, who were ancestors of modern Native Americans. However, anthropologist Shepard Krech points out that large animal species vanished even in areas where there is no evidence to demonstrate that Paleoindians hunted them. Nor were extinctions confined to large animals: small animals, plants, and insects disappeared, presumably not all through human consumption. Krech also contradicts Martin's exclusion of climatic change as an explanation by asserting that widespread climatic change did indeed occur at the end of the Pleistocene. Still, Krech attributes secondary if not primary responsibility for the extinctions to the Paleoindians, arguing that humans have produced local extinctions elsewhere. But, according to historian Richard White, even the attribution of secondary responsibility may not be supported by the evidence. White observes that Martin's thesis depends on coinciding dates for the arrival of humans and the decline of large animal species, and Krech, though aware that the dates are controversial, does not challenge them; yet recent archaeological discoveries are providing evidence that the date of human arrival was much earlier than 11,000 years ago.