mucholderthen: Global late Quaternary  [132,000 to 1,000 years ago] Megafauna Extinct

mucholderthen:

Global late Quaternary  [132,000 to 1,000 years ago] Megafauna Extinctions linked to humans, not climate change

Christopher Sandom, Søren Faurby, Brody Sandel and Jens-Christian Svenning (Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Denmark)
— Proceedings of the Royal Society / Biological Sciences, 22 July 2014 

AbstractThe late Quaternary megafauna extinction was a severe global-scale event. Two factors, climate change and modern humans, have received broad support as the primary drivers, but their absolute and relative importance remains controversial. …

We present, to our knowledge, the first global analysis of this extinction based on comprehensive country-level data on the geographical distribution of all large mammal species (more than or equal to 10 kg) that have gone globally or continentally extinct between the beginning of the Last Interglacial at 132 000 years BP and the late Holocene 1000 years BP, testing the relative roles played by glacial–interglacial climate change and humans.

We show that the severity of extinction is strongly tied to hominin palaeobiogeography, with at most a weak, Eurasia-specific link to climate change. …

IMAGE  Global maps of late Quaternary [a, b] large mammal extinction severity, [c]  hominin palaeobiogeography, [d] temperature anomaly and [e] precipitation velocity. [More detail here…]

Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change is an open access article.