Abstract
Climate change and humans are proposed as the two key drivers of total extinction of many large mammals in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, but disentangling their relative roles remains challenging owing to a lack of quantitative evaluation of human impact and climate-driven distribution changes on the extinctions of these large mammals in a continuous temporal-spatial dimension. Here, our analyses showed that temperature change had significant effects on mammoth (genus Mammuthus), rhinoceros (Rhinocerotidae), horse (Equidae) and deer (Cervidae). Rapid global warming was the predominant factor driving the total extinction of mammoths and rhinos in frigid zones from the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. Humans showed significant, negative effects on extirpations of the four mammalian taxa, and were the predominant factor causing the extinction or major extirpations of rhinos and horses. Deer survived both rapid climate warming and extensive human impacts. Our study indicates that both the current rates of warming and range shifts of species are much faster than those from the Late Pleistocene to Holocene. Our results provide new insight into the extinction of Late Quaternary megafauna by demonstrating taxon-, period- and region-specific differences in extinction drivers of climate change and human disturbances, and some implications about the extinction risk of animals by recent and ongoing climate warming.
Highlights
The extinction of megafauna in the Late Pleistocene to Holocene has long puzzled scientists and the public
Our results indicated that quantitative analysis by using continuous temporal–spatial palaeontological and archaeological records enabled us to distinguish the impacts of climate warming and humans in causing the extinction or major extirpations of four megafauna mammalian groups in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene
We found that climate warming was the predominant driver of total extinction of mammoths and rhinos in cold zones from the Late Pleistocene to Holocene, while human impacts were the predominant driver of total extinction of rhinos and horse extinctions in the Anthropocene and Holocene
Summary
The extinction of megafauna in the Late Pleistocene to Holocene has long puzzled scientists and the public. We use palaeontological and archaeological records to quantitatively assess the impacts of temperature and human activities in causing extirpations on local (within a 100 Â 100 km grid) and regional (climate-driven range contraction along latitude) scales; we examine what triggered the extinction or major extirpations of four megafauna mammalian groups (i.e. mammoth, rhinoceros, horse and deer) in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. Data for four large mammal groups with sufficient records in Eurasia from the Late Pleistocene to Holocene were used for statistical analyses: the mammoth (Mammuthus), rhinoceroses (Rhinocerotidae), horses (Equidae) and deer (Cervidae) (electronic supplementary material, figure S1). Data for human sites covering China were extracted from a Chinese history map published by the Liren Publishing House in 1984 and a book entitled ‘The Chinese Ancient History’ published by Shanghai People’s Publishing House in 2000 (electronic supplementary material, figure S2) The correlation analyses were carried out in the R environment (v. 3.2.2) via the stats library (v. 3.2.2) and the base library (v. 3.2.2) [25]; human impact criteria were calculated in the R environment (v. 3.2.2) via the FNN (v. 1.1), rgdal (v. 1.1-10) and geosphere (v. 1.5-5) library [29,30,31,32]
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