Abstract
Drivers of Late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions are relevant to modern conservation policy in a world of growing human population density, climate change, and faunal decline. Traditional debates tend toward global solutions, blaming either dramatic climate change or dispersals of Homo sapiens to new regions. Inherent limitations to archaeological and paleontological data sets often require reliance on scant, poorly resolved lines of evidence. However, recent developments in scientific technologies allow for more local, context-specific approaches. In the present article, we highlight how developments in five such methodologies (radiocarbon approaches, stable isotope analysis, ancient DNA, ancient proteomics, microscopy) have helped drive detailed analysis of specific megafaunal species, their particular ecological settings, and responses to new competitors or predators, climate change, and other external phenomena. The detailed case studies of faunal community composition, extinction chronologies, and demographic trends enabled by these methods examine megafaunal extinctions at scales appropriate for practical understanding of threats against particular species in their habitats today.
Highlights
Drivers of Late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions are relevant to modern conservation policy in a world of growing human population density, climate change, and faunal decline
We aim to review the role of five such methods in generating high-resolution data sets and facilitating context- and species-specific understandings of extinction chronologies, population dynamics, and paleoenvironments
We argue that the data sets afforded by new laboratory methods enrich the detail with which archaeologists and paleontologists can approach processes of extinction and extirpation, and allow studies of past megafauna to inform conservation science and environmental sustainability
Summary
Micro Methods for Megafauna: Novel Approaches to Late Quaternary Extinctions and Their Contributions to Faunal Conservation in the Anthropocene. Roberts et al 2014) and Africa (Faith 2014) has indicated that many megafauna survived the arrival or expansion of human populations and climatic variability during the Late Pleistocene Such studies point to local extirpations and redistributions of species as a product of long-term environmental change, as well as a process that varied greatly between taxa and habitats. We argue that the data sets afforded by new laboratory methods enrich the detail with which archaeologists and paleontologists can approach processes of extinction and extirpation, and allow studies of past megafauna to inform conservation science and environmental sustainability Studies of this nature will increasingly enable larger-scale, synthetic efforts to draw broad lessons from human–megafauna interactions across space and time
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