Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Volumn 281, Issue 1787, 2014, Pages

  Sandom, Christopher ^a   Faurby, Søren ^a   Sandel, Brody ^a   Svenning, Jens Christian ^a  

^a AARHUS UNIVERSITY   (Denmark)

Author keywords

Climate change; Macroecology; Megafauna extinction; Overkill; Palaeoecology

Indexed keywords

CLIMATE VARIATION; EXTINCTION; GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION; HOLOCENE; HUMAN ACTIVITY; LAST INTERGLACIAL; MACROECOLOGY; MAMMAL; PALEOBIOGEOGRAPHY; TAXONOMY;

EURASIA;

EID: 84902683065     PISSN: 09628452     EISSN: 14712954     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.3254     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Prescott GW, Williams DR, Balmford A, Green RE, Manica A. 2012 Quantitative global analysis of the role of climate and people in explaining late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, 4527-4531. (doi: 10. 1073/pnas. 1113875109).
2. Stegner MA, Holmes M. 2013 Using palaeontological data to assess mammalian community structure: potential aid in conservation planning. Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol. 372, 138-146. (doi: 10. 1016/j. palaeo. 2012. 04. 019).
3. Barnosky AD, Koch PL, Feranec RS, Wing SL, Shabel AB. 2004 Assessing the causes of Late Pleistocene extinctions on the continents. Science 306, 70-75. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 1101476).
4. Wroe S, Field J. 2006 A review of the evidence for a human role in the extinction of Australian megafauna and an alternative interpretation. Quat. Sci. Rev. 25, 2692-2703. (doi: 10. 1016/j. quascirev. 2006. 03. 005).
5. Guthrie RD. 2003 Rapid body size decline in Alaskan Pleistocene horses before extinction. Nature 426, 169-171. (doi: 10. 1038/Nature02098).
6. Martin PS, Wright EJ. (eds) 1967 Pleistocene extinctions: the search for a cause. Proc. 7th congress of the Int. Association for Quaternary Research, vol. 6. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
7. Alroy J. 2001 A multispecies overkill simulation of the End-Pleistocene megafaunal mass extinction. Science 292, 1893-1896. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 1059342).
8. Burney DA, Flannery TF. 2005 Fifty millennia of catastrophic extinctions after human contact. Trends Ecol. Evol. 20, 395-401. (doi: 10. 1016/j. tree. 2005. 04. 022).
9. Lyons SK, Smith FA, Brown JH. 2004 Of mice, mastodons and men: human-mediated extinctions on four continents. Evol. Ecol. Res. 6, 339-358.
10. Firestone RB et al. 2007 Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12, 900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 16 016-16 021. (doi: 10. 1073/pnas. 070697 7104).
11. Lyons KS, Smith FA, Wagner PJ, White EP, Brown JH. 2004 Was a 'hyperdisease' responsible for the Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction? Ecol. Lett. 7, 859-868. (doi: 10. 1111/j. 1461-0248. 2004. 00643. x).
12. Gill JL, Blois JL, Goring S, Marlon JR, Bartlein PJ, Nicoll K, Scott AC, Whitlock C. 2012 Paleoecological changes at Lake Cuitzeo were not consistent with an extraterrestrial impact. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, E2243. (doi: 10. 1073/pnas. 1206196109).
13. Wittke JH et al. 2013 Evidence for deposition of 10 million tonnes of impact spherules across four continents 12, 800 y ago. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110, E2088-E2097. (doi: 10. 1073/pnas. 13017 60110).
14. Boslough M et al. 2012 Arguments and evidence against a Younger Dryas impact event. Geophys. Monogr. Ser. 198, 13-26.
15. Koch PL, Barnosky AD. 2006 Late Quaternary extinctions: state of the debate. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 37, 215-250. (doi: 10. 1146/annurev. ecolsys. 34. 011802. 132415).
16. Grayson DK, Meltzer DJ. 2003 A requiem for North American overkill. J. Archaeol. Sci. 30, 585-593. (doi: 10. 1016/s0305-4403(02)00205-4).
17. Gill JL, Williams JW, Jackson ST, Lininger KB, Robinson GS. 2009 Pleistocene megafaunal collapse, novel plant communities, and enhanced fire regimes in North America. Science 326, 1100-1103. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 1179504).
18. Prideaux GJ et al. 2010 Timing and dynamics of Late Pleistocene mammal extinctions in southwestern Australia. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 107, 22 157-22 162. (doi: 10. 1073/pnas. 1011073107).
19. Barnosky AD, Lindsey EL. 2010 Timing of Quaternary megafaunal extinction in South America in relation to human arrival and climate change. Quat. Int. 217, 10-29. (doi: 10. 1016/j. quaint. 2009. 11. 017).
20. Nogués-Bravo D, Ohlemüller R, Batra P, Araújo MB. 2010 Climate predictors of late Quaternary extinctions. Evolution 64, 2442-2449. (doi: 10. 1111/j. 1558-5646. 2010. 01009. x).
21. Sandel B, Arge L, Dalsgaard B, Davies RG, Gaston KJ, Sutherland WJ, Svenning J-C. 2011 The influence of late Quaternary climate-change velocity on species endemism. Science 334, 660-664. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 1210173).
22. Loarie SR, Duffy PB, Hamilton H, Asner GP, Field CB, Ackerly DD. 2009 The velocity of climate change. Nature 462, 1052-1055. (doi: 10. 1038/nature08649).
23. Brown JH, Maurer BA. 1989 Macroecology: the division of food and space among species on continents. Science 243, 1145-1150. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 243. 4895. 1145).
24. Finlayson C. 2005 Biogeography and evolution of the genus Homo. Trends Ecol. Evol. 20, 457-463. (doi: 10. 1016/j. tree. 2005. 05. 019).
25. Stewart JR, Stringer CB. 2012 Human evolution out of Africa: the role of refugia and climate change. Science 335, 1317-1321. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 1215627).
26. Goebel T, Waters MR, O'Rourke DH. 2008 The Late Pleistocene dispersal of modern humans in the Americas. Science 319, 1497-1502. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 1153569).
27. Martin PS. 1984 Prehistoric overkill: the global model. In Quaternary extinctions: a prehistoric revolution (eds PS Martin, RG Klein), pp. 354-403. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.
28. Ben-Dor M, Gopher A, Hershkovitz I, Barkai R. 2011 Man the fat hunter: the demise of Homo erectus and the emergence of a new hominin lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant. PLoS ONE 6, e28689. (doi: 10. 1371/journal. pone. 0028689).
29. Weinstock J et al. 2005 Evolution, systematics, and phylogeography of Pleistocene horses in the new world: a molecular perspective. PLoS Biol. 3, e241. (doi: 10. 1371/journal. pbio. 0030241).
30. Smith FA, Lyons SK, Ernest SKM, Jones KE, Kaufman DM, Dayan T, Marquet PA, Brown JH, Haskell JP. 2003 Body mass of late Quaternary mammals. Ecology 84, 3402-3403. (doi: 10. 1890/02-9002).
31. Brummitt RK. 2001 World geographical scheme for recording plant distributions, 2nd edn. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation.
32. Faunmap working group 1994 FAUNMAP: a database documenting late Quaternary distributions of mammal species in the United States. Illinois State Mus. Sci. Papers 25, 1-690.
33. Sanderson EW, Jaiteh M, Levy MA, Redford KH, Wannebo AV, Woolmer G. 2002 The human footprint and the last of the wild. Bioscience 52, 891-904. (doi: 10. 1641/0006-3568(2002) 052[0891: thfatl]2. 0. co; 2).
34. Schipper J et al. 2008 The status of the world's land and marine mammals: diversity, threat, and knowledge. Science 322, 225-230. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 1165115).
35. Hijmans RJ, Cameron SE, Parra JL, Jones PG, Jarvis A. 2005 Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. Int. J. Climatol. 25, 1965-1978. (doi: 10. 1002/joc. 1276).
36. Collins WD et al. 2006 The community climate system model version 3 (CCSM3). J. Clim. 19, 2122-2143. (doi: 10. 1175/JCLI3761. 1).
37. Hasumi H, Emori S. 2004 K-1 coupled gcm (miroc) description. Tokyo, Japan: Center for Climate System Research, University of Tokyo.
38. Eriksson A, Betti L, Friend AD, Lycett SJ, Singarayer JS, von Cramon-Taubadel N, Valdes PJ, Balloux F, Manica A. 2012 Late Pleistocene climate change and the global expansion of anatomically modern humans. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, 16 089-16 094. (doi: 10. 1073/pnas. 1209494109).
39. Warton DI, Hui FKC. 2011 The arcsine is asinine: the analysis of proportions in ecology. Ecology 92, 3-10. (doi: 10. 1890/10-0340. 1).
40. Bjornstad ON. 2012 ncf: spatial nonparametric covariance functions. R package v. 1. 1-4 ed. See http://cran. r-project. org/web/packages/ncf/index. html.
41. Kissling WD, Carl G. 2008 Spatial autocorrelation and the selection of simultaneous autoregressive models. Glob. Ecol. Biogeogr. 17, 59-71. (doi: 10. 1111/j. 1466-8238. 2007. 00334. x).
42. Bivand R et al. 2012 spdep: spatial dependence: weighting schemes, statistics and models. R package v. 0. 5-46 ed. See http://cran. r-project. org/web/packages/spdep/index. html.
43. R Development Core Team 2012 R: a language and environment for statistical computing, 2. 15. 1 edn. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. ISBN 3-900051-07-0; http://www. R-project. org.
44. De Vivo M, Carmignotto AP. 2004 Holocene vegetation change and the mammal faunas of South America and Africa. J. Biogeogr. 31, 943-957. (doi: 10. 1111/j. 1365-2699. 2004. 01068. x).
45. Schüler L, Hemp A, Zech W, Behling H. 2012 Vegetation, climate and fire-dynamics in East Africa inferred from the Maundi crater pollen record from Mt Kilimanjaro during the last glacial-interglacial cycle. Quat. Sci. Rev. 39, 1-13. (doi: 10. 1016/j. quascirev. 2012. 02. 003).
46. Dantas MAT, Dutra RP, Cherkinsky A, Fortier DC, Kamino LHY, Cozzuol MA, Ribeiro ADS, Vieira FS. 2013 Paleoecology and radiocarbon dating of the Pleistocene megafauna of the Brazilian Intertropical Region. Quat. Res. 79, 61-65. (doi: 10. 1016/j. yqres. 2012. 09. 006).
47. Prado JL, Alberdi MT, Azanza B, Sánchez B. 2001 Climate and changes in mammal diversity during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene in the Pampean region (Argentina). Acta Palaeontol. Polonica 46, 261-276.
48. Gutiérrez MA, Martínez GA. 2008 Trends in the faunal human exploitation during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene in the Pampean region (Argentina). Quat. Int. 191, 53-68. (doi: 10. 1016/j. quaint. 2007. 09. 024).
49. Miller GH, Fogel ML, Magee JW, Gagan MK, Clarke SJ, Johnson BJ. 2005 Ecosystem collapse in pleistocene Australia and a human role in megafaunal extinction. Science 309, 287-290. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 1111288).
50. Rule S, Brook BW, Haberle SG, Turney CSM, Kershaw AP, Johnson CN. 2012 The aftermath of megafaunal extinction: ecosystem transformation in Pleistocene Australia. Science 335, 1483-1486. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 1214261).
51. Owen-Smith N. 1987 Pleistocene extinctions: the pivotal role of megaherbivores. Paleobiology 13, 351-362.
52. Johnson CN. 2009 Ecological consequences of late Quaternary extinctions of megafauna. Proc. R. Soc. B 276, 2509-2519. (doi: 10. 1098/rspb. 2008. 1921).
53. Johnson DL. 1977 The California ice-age refugium and the Rancholabrean extinction problem. Quat. Res. 8, 149-153. (doi: 10. 1016/0033-5894(77) 90042-4).
54. Johnson DL. 1977 The late Quaternary climate of Coastal California: evidence for an ice age refugium. Quat. Res. 8, 154-179. (doi: 10. 1016/0033-5894(77)90043-6).
55. Green JL, Semprebon GM, Solounias N. 2005 Reconstructing the palaeodiet of Florida Mammut americanum via low-magnification stereomicroscopy. Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol. 223, 34-48. (doi: 10. 1016/j. palaeo. 2005. 03. 026).
56. Kropf M, Mead JI, Scott Anderson R. 2007 Dung, diet, and the paleoenvironment of the extinct shrub-ox (Euceratherium collinum) on the Colorado Plateau, USA. Quat. Res. 67, 143-151. (doi: 10. 1016/j. yqres. 2006. 10. 002).
57. Grund BS, Surovell TA, Lyons SK. 2012 Range sizes and shifts of North American Pleistocene mammals are not consistent with a climatic explanation for extinction. World Archaeol. 44, 43-55. (doi: 10. 1080/00438243. 2012. 648427).
58. Fiedel S, Haynes G. 2004 A premature burial: comments on Grayson and Meltzer's 'Requiem for overkill'. J. Archaeol. Sci. 31, 121-131. (doi: 10. 1016/j. jas. 2003. 06. 004).
59. Surovell TA, Waguespack NM. 2008 How many elephant kills are 14? Clovis mammoth and mastodon kills in context. Quat. Int. 191, 82-97. (doi: 10. 1016/j. quaint. 2007. 12. 001).
60. Lorenzen ED et al. 2011 Species-specific responses of late Quaternary megafauna to climate and humans. Nature 479, 359-364. (doi: 10. 1038/nature10574).
61. Graham RW et al. 1996 Spatial response of mammals to late Quaternary environmental fluctuations. Science 272, 1601-1606. (doi: 10. 1126/science. 272. 5268. 1601).
62. Lister AM, Stuart AJ. 2008 The impact of climate change on large mammal distribution and extinction: evidence from the last glacial/interglacial transition. C R Geosci. 340, 615-620. (doi: 10. 1016/j. crte. 2008. 04. 001).
63. Nyström V et al. 2012 Microsatellite genotyping reveals End-Pleistocene decline in mammoth autosomal genetic variation. Mol. Ecol. 21, 3391-3402. (doi: 10. 1111/j. 1365-294X. 2012. 05525. x).
64. Corlett RT. 2010 Megafaunal extinctions and their consequences in the tropical IndoPacific. In Altered ecologies: fire, climate and human influence on terrestrial landscapes (eds S Haberle, J Stevenson, M Prebble), pp. 117-131. Canberra, Australia: ANU E Press.
65. García-Alix A, Delgado Huertas A, Martín Suárez E. 2012 Unravelling the Late Pleistocene habitat of the southernmost woolly mammoths in Europe. Quaternary Sci. Rev. 32, 75-85. (doi: 10. 1016/j. quascirev. 2011. 11. 007).
66. Werdelin L, Lewis ME. 2013 Temporal change in functional richness and evenness in the eastern African Plio-Pleistocene carnivoran guild. PLoS ONE 8, e57944. (doi: 10. 1371/journal. pone. 0057944).
67. Donlan J. 2005 Re-wilding North America. Nature 436, 913-914. (doi: 10. 1038/436913a).