Collapse of an ecological network in Ancient Egypt

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Volumn 111, Issue 40, 2014, Pages 14475-14477

  Yeakel, Justin D ^a,b,c   Pires, Mathias M ^d   Rudolf, Lars ^e,f   Dominy, Nathaniel J ^g,h   Koch, Paul L ^a   Guimarães, Paulo R ^d   Gross, Thilo ^e,f  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^c SANTA FE INSTITUTE   (United States)

^d UNIVERSITY OF SÃO PAULO   (Brazil)

^e UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

^f MAX PLANCK INSTITUT FÜR PHYSIK KOMPLEXER SYSTEME   (Germany)

^g DARTMOUTH COLLEGE   (United States)

^h Departments of Biological Sciences Dartmouth College ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

Community stability; Dynamic sensitivity; Historical ecology; Redundancy; Trophic interactions

Indexed keywords

ANIMAL; CLIMATE CHANGE; COLONY COLLAPSE; ECOSYSTEM; EGYPT; FOOD CHAIN; HISTORY; MAMMAL; PALEONTOLOGY; POPULATION DYNAMICS; SPECIES EXTINCTION;

ANIMALS; CLIMATE CHANGE; COLONY COLLAPSE; ECOSYSTEM; EGYPT; EXTINCTION, BIOLOGICAL; FOOD CHAIN; HISTORY, ANCIENT; MAMMALS; PALEONTOLOGY; POPULATION DYNAMICS;

EID: 84907841561     PISSN: 00278424     EISSN: 10916490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1408471111     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Pace ML, Cole JJ, Carpenter SR, Kitchell JF (1999) Trophic cascades revealed in diverse ecosystems. Trends Ecol Evol 14(12): 483-488.
2. Eklöf A, Ebenman B (2006) Species loss and secondary extinctions in simple and complex model communities. J Anim Ecol 75(1): 239-246.
3. Estes JA, et al. (2011) Trophic downgrading of planet Earth. Science 333(6040): 301-306.
4. Yeakel JD, Guimarães PR, Jr, Bocherens H, Koch PL (2013) The impact of climate change on the structure of Pleistocene food webs across the mammoth steppe. Proc Roy Soc B 280(1762): 20130239.
5. Bernhardt CE, Horton BP, Stanley JD (2012) Nile Delta vegetation response to Holocene climate variability. Geology 40(7): 615-618.
6. Adkins J, deMenocal PB, Eshel G (2006) The "African humid period" and the record of marine upwelling from excess 230Th in Ocean Drilling Program Hole 658C. Paleoceanography 21(4): PA4203.
7. Churcher CS (1972) Late Pleistocene Vertebrates from Archaeological Sites in the Plain of Kom Ombo, Upper Egypt (Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto).
8. Osborn DJ, Osbornová J (1998) The Mammals of Ancient Egypt (Aris and Phillips, Oxford).
9. Linstädter J, Kröpelin S (2004) Wadi Bakht revisited: Holocene climate change and prehistoric occupation in the Gilf Kebir Region of the Eastern Sahara, SW Egypt. Geoarchaeology 19(8): 753-778.
10. Heller R, Brüniche-Olsen A, Siegismund HR (2012) Cape buffalo mitogenomics reveals a Holocene shift in the African human-megafauna dynamics. Mol Ecol 21(16): 3947-3959.
11. Kuper R, Kröpelin S (2006) Climate-controlled Holocene occupation in the Sahara: Motor of Africa's evolution. Science 313(5788): 803-807.
12. Brooks N (2006) Cultural responses to aridity in the Middle Holocene and increased social complexity. Quat Int 151(1): 29-49.
13. Adams B (1997) Protodynastic Egypt (Osprey Publishing, Buckinghamshire, UK).
14. Butzer KW (2012) Collapse, environment, and society. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(10): 3632-3639.
15. Trigger BG (1983) Ancient Egypt: A Social History (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK).
16. Cullen H, et al. (2000) Climate change and the collapse of the Akkadian empire: Evidence from the deep sea. Geology 28(4): 379-382.
17. Dixit Y, Hodell DA, Petrie CA (2014) Abrupt weakening of the summer monsoon in northwest India ~4100 yr ago. Geology 42(4): 339-342.
18. Kaniewski D, et al. (2008) Middle East coastal ecosystem response to middle-to-late Holocene abrupt climate changes. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105(37): 13941-13946.
19. Roberts N, Eastwood WJ, Kuzucuoglu C, Fiorentino G, Caracuta V (2011) Climatic, vegetation and cultural change in the eastern Mediterranean during the mid-Holocene environmental transition. Holocene 21(1): 147-162.
20. deMenocal PB (2001) Cultural responses to climate change during the late Holocene. Science 292(5517): 667-673.
21. deMenocal PB (2004) African climate change and faunal evolution during the Pliocene- Pleistocene. Earth Planet Sci Lett 220(1-2): 3-24.
22. Butzer KW, Endfield GH (2012) Critical perspectives on historical collapse. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(10): 3628-3631.
23. Churcher CS (1993) Equus grevyi. Mamm Species 453(1): 1-9.
24. Osborn DJ, Helmy I (1980) The Contemporary Land Mammals of Egypt (Including Sinai). (Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago).
25. Hendrickx S, Riemer H, Förster F, Darnell JC (2009) Late Predynastic-Early Dynastic rock art scenes of Barbary sheep hunting from Egypt's Western Desert. From capturing wild animals to thewomen of the "Acacia House." Desert Animals in the Eastern Sahara: Status, Economic Significance and Cultural Reflection in Antiquity. Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary ACACIA Workshop Held at the University of Cologne, ed Riemer H (Heinrich-Barth-Institut, Cologne, Germany), pp 14-15.
26. Davies N (1943) The Tomb of Rekh-mi-Re at Thebes (Arno Press, New York).
27. Churcher CS (1984) Zoological study of the ivory knife handle from Abu Zaidan. Predynastic and Archaic Egypt in the Brooklyn Museum, ed Needier W (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY), pp 152-169.
28. Spencer AJ (1980) Catalogue of Egyptian Antiquities in Ancient Egypt V: Early Dynastic Objects (British Museum Publications, London).
29. Olff H, et al. (2009) Parallel ecological networks in ecosystems. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 364(1524): 1755-1779.
30. Baskerville EB, et al. (2011) Spatial guilds in the Serengeti food web revealed by a Bayesian group model. PLoS Comput Biol 7(12): E1002321.
31. Yeakel JD, Guimarães PR, Jr, Novak M, Fox-Dobbs K, Koch PL (2012) Probabilistic patterns of interaction: The effects of link-strength variability on food web structure. J R Soc Interface 9(77): 3219-3228.
32. Barnett R, et al. (2014) Revealing the maternal demographic history of Panthera leo using ancient DNA and a spatially explicit genealogical analysis. BMC Evol Biol 14(1): 70.
33. Schaller GB (1972) The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations (Univ of Chicago Press, Chicago).
34. Hassan FA (1985) Radiocarbon chronology of Neolithic and Predynastic sites in Upper Egypt and the Delta. Afr Archaeol Rev 3(1): 95-115.
35. Doughty CE, Wolf A, Malhi Y (2013) The impact of large animal extinctions on nutrient fluxes in early river valley civilizations. Ecosphere 4(12).
36. Rowcliffe JM, Cowlishaw G, Long J (2003) A model of human hunting impacts in multi-prey communities. J Appl Ecol 40(5): 872-889.
37. Gross T, Rudolf L, Levin SA, Dieckmann U (2009) Generalized models reveal stabilizing factors in food webs. Science 325(5941): 747-750.
38. Rohr RP, Scherer H, Kehrli P, Mazza C, Bersier LF (2010) Modeling food webs: Exploring unexplained structure using latent traits. Am Nat 176(2): 170-177.
39. Yeakel JD, Stiefs D, Novak M, Gross T (2011) Generalized modeling of ecological population dynamics. Theor Ecol 4(2): 179-194.
40. Schneider DW (1997) Predation and food web structure along a habitat duration gradient. Oecologia 110(4): 567-575.
41. Williams RJ, Martinez ND (2000) Simple rules yield complex food webs. Nature 404(6774): 180-183.
42. May RM (1972) Will a large complex system be stable? Nature 238(5364): 413-414.
43. McCann KS (2000) The diversity-stability debate. Nature 405(6783): 228-233.
44. Aufderheide H, Rudolf L, Gross T, Lafferty KD (2013) How to predict community responses to perturbations in the face of imperfect knowledge and network complexity. Proc Roy Soc B 280(1773): 20132355.
45. El Alqamy H, El Din SB (2006) Contemporary status and distribution of gazelle species (Gazella dorcas and Gazella leptoceros) in Egypt. Zool Middle East 39(1): 5-16.
46. Gross T, Feudel U (2006) Generalized models as a universal approach to the analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys 73(1 Pt 2): 016205.
47. Rosenzweig ML (1971) Paradox of enrichment: Destabilization of exploitation ecosystems in ecological time. Science 171(3969): 385-387.
48. Woodward G, Perkins DM, Brown LE (2010) Climate change and freshwater ecosystems: Impacts across multiple levels of organization. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 365(1549): 2093-2106.
49. Lurgi M, López BC, Montoya JM (2012) Climate change impacts on body size and food web structure on mountain ecosystems. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 367(1605): 3050-3057.
50. Walther GR, et al. (2002) Ecological responses to recent climate change. Nature 416(6879): 389-395.
51. Sinervo B, et al. (2010) Erosion of lizard diversity by climate change and altered thermal niches. Science 328(5980): 894-899.
52. Brose U, et al. (2012) Climate change in size-structured ecosystems. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 367(1605): 2903-2912.
53. Berg MP, et al. (2010) Adapt or disperse: Understanding species persistence in a changing world. Glob Change Biol 16(2): 587-598.
54. Novak M, et al. (2011) Predicting community responses to perturbations in the face of imperfect knowledge and network complexity. Ecology 92(4): 836-846.
55. Stock F, Gifford-Gonzalez D (2013) Genetics and African cattle domestication. Afr Archaeol Rev 30(1): 51-72.
56. Cardillo M, et al. (2005) Multiple causes of high extinction risk in large mammal species. Science 309(5738): 1239-1241.
57. Davis W (1992) Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art (Univ of California Press, Berkeley, CA).