Abstract
The 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. To date, focus has been on the extinction chronology of individual or small groups of species, specific geographical regions or macroscale studies at very coarse geographical and taxonomic resolution, limiting the possibility of adequately testing the proposed hypotheses. 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. This first species-level macroscale analysis at relatively high geographical resolution provides strong support for modern humans as the primary driver of the worldwide megafauna losses during the late Quaternary.
Highlights
During the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene, regions around the world suffered losses of megafauna species of a magnitude unprecedented for many millions of years [1,2,3]
Barnosky et al [3] provided a continental breakdown of the Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions and reported that humans were the main extinction driver in Australia and North America, and climate was the main driver for Europe, but that data were insufficient for making assessments for Africa, Asia and South America
The global pattern of late Quaternary megafauna extinction presents a clear picture that extinction is closely tied to the geography of human evolution and expansion and at most weakly to the severity of climate change
Summary
During the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene, regions around the world suffered losses of megafauna species of a magnitude unprecedented for many millions of years [1,2,3]. For these regions, extant large mammal TDWG richness was estimated from this model using the lowest human impact recorded within the specific continent, and so within the predictive range of our models (electronic supplementary material, figure S11). We initially constructed GLMs using an arcsine square-root transformation of the response variable to account for the non-normal distribution of the proportion data This transformation was deemed appropriate because the nature of these binomial data were not a factor of sampling effort and we wanted to give a 50% reduction of large mammal community within a TDWG country the same weight no matter if the reduction was from four to two species or 50–25 to avoid recording low extinction severity in regions with low total species diversity. All analyses were performed in R.v. 2.15.1 [43]
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