Millennial-scale faunal record reveals differential resilience of European large mammals to human impacts across the Holocene.

Jennifer J Crees,Robert S Sommer,Chris Carbone,Samuel T Turvey,Norbert Benecke

doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.2152

Abstract

The use of short-term indicators for understanding patterns and processes of biodiversity loss can mask longer-term faunal responses to human pressures. We use an extensive database of approximately 18 700 mammalian zooarchaeological records for the last 11 700 years across Europe to reconstruct spatio-temporal dynamics of Holocene range change for 15 large-bodied mammal species. European mammals experienced protracted, non-congruent range losses, with significant declines starting in some species approximately 3000 years ago and continuing to the present, and with the timing, duration and magnitude of declines varying individually between species. Some European mammals became globally extinct during the Holocene, whereas others experienced limited or no significant range change. These findings demonstrate the relatively early onset of prehistoric human impacts on postglacial biodiversity, and mirror species-specific patterns of mammalian extinction during the Late Pleistocene. Herbivores experienced significantly greater declines than carnivores, revealing an important historical extinction filter that informs our understanding of relative resilience and vulnerability to human pressures for different taxa. We highlight the importance of large-scale, long-term datasets for understanding complex protracted extinction processes, although the dynamic pattern of progressive faunal depletion of European mammal assemblages across the Holocene challenges easy identification of ‘static’ past baselines to inform current-day environmental management and restoration.

Highlights

Extinction constitutes a process rather than a single event, with the final disappearance of the last individual of a species merely the endpoint of an often protracted series of regional population losses which may take decades, centuries or even longer to run their course [1]
Our analysis of an extensive, approximately 11 700-year, continental-scale zooarchaeological dataset reveals that the European large mammal fauna experienced a protracted depletion of species ranges across the later part of the Holocene, with significant declines starting in some species approximately 3000 years ago and continuing into the recent historical era
This new model of continental Holocene mammalian biodiversity loss reveals that the globally extinct aurochs, and over half of Europe’s widely distributed large mammal fauna, underwent statistically detectable postglacial population declines before the recent historical era, with accurate identification of these losses requiring a framework of quantitative analysis that controlled for error and bias in baseline zooarchaeological data

Summary

Introduction

Extinction constitutes a process rather than a single event, with the final disappearance of the last individual of a species merely the endpoint of an often protracted series of regional population losses which may take decades, centuries or even longer to run their course [1]. This region represents a unique study system across which to investigate long-term human impacts on biodiversity, as a wealth of dated occurrence records spanning the Holocene, comprising subfossil, zooarchaeological, historical and ecological data, are available for many European large mammal species.

Results

Conclusion