Late Quaternary extinctions in the Indian Subcontinent

Abstract

Over the last 50,000 years, a majority of megafauna went extinct globally. Only two regions, Africa, and tropical Asia retain megafaunal communities today. Their persistence in Africa has been attributed to co-evolution with hominins, but faunal dynamics are largely understudied in South Asia. Focusing on the Indian Subcontinent and using a novel dataset compiled from the published literature, we report an extremely size biased, but low magnitude extinction during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene—approximately 30,000 years after the arrival of Homo sapiens in the region. We document four mammalian extinctions—Palaeoloxodon namadicus, Stegodon namadicus, Hexaprotodon sp., and Equus namadicus; the extirpation of ostriches (Struthio camelus); and a pseudo-extinction of Indian aurochs (Bos namadicus). The per-capita extinction rate is comparable to eastern and southern Africa, but much lower than elsewhere. Given the long history of hominins in the Indian Subcontinent, and similar extinction patterns to those seen in Africa, we provide the first independent test of the co-evolution hypothesis, and further, suggest that robust population networks and climatic refugia may have allowed for the persistence of megafauna in this region.