Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents
@article{Barnosky2004AssessingTC, title={Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents}, author={Anthony D Barnosky and Paul L. Koch and Robert S. Feranec and Scott L. Wing and Alan B. Shabel}, journal={Science}, year={2004}, volume={306}, pages={70 - 75} }
One of the great debates about extinction is whether humans or climatic change caused the demise of the Pleistocene megafauna. Evidence from paleontology, climatology, archaeology, and ecology now supports the idea that humans contributed to extinction on some continents, but human hunting was not solely responsible for the pattern of extinction everywhere. Instead, evidence suggests that the intersection of human impacts with pronounced climatic change drove the precise timing and geography of…
856 Citations
Bigger kill than chill: The uneven roles of humans and climate on late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions
- Environmental Science, Geography
- 2017
Fifty millennia of catastrophic extinctions after human contact.
- Environmental Science, GeographyTrends in ecology & evolution
- 2005
Late Pleistocene and Holocene mammal extinctions on continental Africa
- Geography, Environmental Science
- 2014
The Evidence for Human Agency in the Late Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinctions
- Environmental Science, Geography
- 2013
Megafauna demography and late Quaternary climatic change in Australia: A predisposition to extinction
- Environmental Science, Geography
- 2008
Arguments about the extinction of Australia's megafauna have largely rested on anthropogenic factors consequent upon the arrival of humans there, and have lacked any appreciation of the possibilities…
Quantitative global analysis of the role of climate and people in explaining late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions
- Environmental Science, GeographyProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- 2012
By analyzing the distribution and timing of all megafaunal extinctions in relation to climatic variables and human arrival on five landmasses, it is demonstrated that the observed pattern of extinctions is best explained by models that combine both human arrival and Climatic variables.
Conservation in the Anthropocene
- Environmental ScienceConservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology
- 2012
IT HAS BECOME COMMONPLACE to remark that humans are now the dominant environmental force on the Earth. The indications are strong and diverse. They range from paleontologists reaching a consensus…
Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear
- Environmental Science, GeographyScientific Reports
- 2017
The model reveals that, despite the broad climatic niche of the brown bear, increasing winter temperatures contributed substantially to its Holocene decline — both directly by reducing the species’ reproductive rate and indirectly by facilitating human land use.
Pleistocene Overkill and North American Mammalian Extinctions
- Environmental Science, Geography
- 2015
Clovis groups in Late Pleistocene North America occasionally hunted several now extinct large mammals. But whether their hunting drove 37 genera of animals to extinction has been disputed, largely…
Horses and Megafauna Extinction
- Geography, Environmental Science
- 2017
The causes of Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions remain controversial, with major phases coinciding with both human arrival and major climate change. This event revealed slightly different…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 179 REFERENCES
Explaining the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions: Models, chronologies, and assumptions
- Environmental ScienceProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- 2002
It is demonstrated that in Greater Australia, where the extinctions occurred well before the end of the last Ice Age, estimates of the duration of coexistence between humans and megafauna remain imprecise, and the existing data do not prove the “blitzkrieg” model of overkill.
Exceptional record of mid-Pleistocene vertebrates helps differentiate climatic from anthropogenic ecosystem perturbations.
- Environmental Science, GeographyProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- 2004
It is concluded that climatic warming primarily affected mammals of lower trophic and size categories, in contrast to documented human impacts on higher tropho-size categories historically.
Rapid body size decline in Alaskan Pleistocene horses before extinction
- Environmental Science, GeographyNature
- 2003
It is shown that horses underwent a rapid decline in body size before extinction, and it is proposed that the size decline and subsequent regional extinction at 12,500 radiocarbon years before present are best attributed to a coincident climatic/vegetational shift.
Self‐organised instability and megafaunal extinctions in Australia
- Environmental Science
- 2003
It is proposed that an increase in immigration of fauna from south-east Asia and speciation of the existing local fauna in response to the increasing aridity of the Pliocene led the faunal assemblage of Australia to a level of self-organised instability, as defined by Sole et al. (2002a).
New Ages for the Last Australian Megafauna: Continent-Wide Extinction About 46,000 Years Ago
- Environmental Science, GeographyScience
- 2001
This work reports burial ages for megafauna from 28 sites and infer extinction across the continent around 46,400 years ago, ruling out extreme aridity at the Last Glacial Maximum as the cause of extinction, but not other climatic impacts; a "blitzkrieg" model of human-induced extinction; or an extended period of anthropogenic ecosystem disruption.
MAMMALIAN EXTINCTIONS IN THE LATE PLEISTOCENE OF NORTHERN EURASIA AND NORTH AMERICA
- Environmental Science, GeographyBiological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
- 1991
Although a global phenomenon, late Pleistocene extinctions were most severe in North America, South America and Australia, and moderate in northern Eurasia (Europe plus Soviet Asia), in Africa, where nearly all of the late Pleistsocene ‘megafauna’ survives to the present day, losses were slight.
Megafaunal extinction in the late Quaternary and the global overkill hypothesis
- Environmental Science
- 2004
The global blitzkrieg hypothesis explains differential rates of megafaunal extinction between the world's landmasses in the late Quaternary based on a proposed leap in predation efficiency enjoyed by colonising societies based on simplistic interpretations of complex biogeographicat and anthropological phenomena.
Dynamics of Pleistocene Population Extinctions in Beringian Brown Bears
- Environmental Science, GeographyScience
- 2002
Researchers studied genetic change in the brown bear, Ursus arctos, in eastern Beringia over the past 60,000 years using DNA preserved in permafrost remains to investigate the evolutionary impact of climatic and environmental changes associated with the last glaciation.
Quaternary Megafaunal Extinctions : Variations on a Theme by Paganini
- Environmental Science, Geography
- 1989
Extinctions in near time : causes, contexts, and consequences
- Environmental Science, Geography
- 1999
1 * Cretaceous Meteor Showers, the Human Ecological "Niche," and the Sixth Extinction.- 2 * Prehistoric Extinctions on Islands and Continents.- 3 * The Interaction of Humans, Megaherbivores, and…