Late Pleistocene extinctions

9189:. No disease with such a broad scope of fatal infectivity is known, much less one that remains simultaneously incapable of infecting numerous closely related species within those disparate clades. On the other hand, this objection does not account for the possibility of a variety of different diseases being introduced around the same era. Numerous species including wolves, mammoths, camelids, and horses had emigrated continually between Asia and North America over the past 100,000 years. For the disease hypothesis to be applicable there it would require that the population remain immunologically naive despite this constant transmission of genetic and pathogenic material. The dog-specific hypothesis in particular cannot account for several major extinction events, notably the Americas (for reasons already covered) and Australia. Dogs did not arrive in Australia until approximately 35,000 years after the first humans arrived there, and approximately 30,000 years after the Australian megafaunal extinction was complete. 8850:

those for hunting of predators. It compares the overkill hypothesis (predator hunting = 0) with second-order predation (predator hunting varied between 0.01 and 0.05 for different runs). The findings are that second-order predation is more consistent with extinction than is overkill (results graph at left). The Pleistocene extinction model is the only test of multiple hypotheses and is the only model to specifically test combination hypotheses by artificially introducing sufficient climate change to cause extinction. When overkill and climate change are combined they balance each other out. Climate change reduces the number of plants, overkill removes animals, therefore fewer plants are eaten. Second-order predation combined with climate change exacerbates the effect of climate change. (results graph at right). The second-order predation hypothesis is further supported by the observation above that there was a massive increase in bison populations.

9018:, which had and has a more continental climate than Pleistocene or modern (post-Pleistocene, interglacial) North America. The animals that became extinct actually should have prospered during the shift from mixed woodland-parkland to prairie, because their primary food source, grass, was increasing rather than decreasing. Although the vegetation did become more spatially specialized, the amount of prairie and grass available increased, which would have been good for horses and for mammoths, and yet they became extinct. This criticism ignores the increased abundance and broad geographic extent of Pleistocene bison at the end of the Pleistocene, which would have increased competition for these resources in a manner not seen in any earlier interglacials. Although horses became extinct in the New World, they were successfully reintroduced by the Spanish in the 16th century—into a modern post-Pleistocene, interglacial climate. Today there are 965: 3371: 8721:

time and highly variable climatic situations. The earliest extinctions in Australia were complete approximately 50,000 BP, well before the Last Glacial Maximum and before rises in temperature. The most recent extinction in New Zealand was complete no earlier than 500 BP and during a period of cooling. In between these extremes megafaunal extinctions have occurred progressively in such places as North America, South America and Madagascar with no climatic commonality. The only common factor that can be ascertained is the arrival of humans. This phenomenon appears even within regions. The mammal extinction wave in Australia about 50,000 years ago coincides not with known climatic changes, but with the arrival of humans. In addition, large mammal species like the giant kangaroo

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better able to repeat the reproductive effort when circumstances once more favored offspring survival. A study looking at the environmental conditions across Europe, Siberia and the Americas from 25,000 to 10,000 YBP found that prolonged warming events leading to deglaciation and maximum rainfall occurred just prior to the transformation of the rangelands that supported megaherbivores into widespread wetlands that supported herbivore-resistant plants. The study proposes that moisture-driven environmental change led to the megafaunal extinctions and that Africa's trans-equatorial position allowed rangeland to continue to exist between the deserts and the central forests, therefore fewer megafauna species became extinct there.

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increased fire, reduction in grasslands, and the loss of fresh water. The same environmental deterioration is seen across Australia at the time, further strengthening the climate change argument. Australia's climate at the time could best be described as an overall drying of the landscape due to lower precipitation, resulting in less fresh water availability and more drought conditions. Overall, this led to changes in vegetation, increased fires, overall reduction in grasslands, and a greater competition for already scarce fresh water. These environmental changes proved to be too much for the Australian megafauna to cope with, causing the extinction of 90% of megafauna species.

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called Sporormiella, which survived off the dung of plant-eating mammals. The abundance of these spores in the sediment prior to 45,000 years ago indicates that many large mammals existed in the southwest Australian landscape until that point. The sediment data also indicates that the megafauna population collapsed within a few thousand years, around the 45,000 years ago, suggesting a rapid extinction event. In addition, fossils found at South Walker Creek, which is the youngest megafauna site in northern Australia, indicate that at least 16 species of megafauna survived there until 40,000 years ago. Furthermore, there is no firm evidence of

2011: 6739:, which became widespread across South America. Fishtail projectile points are thought to have been used in big game hunting, though direct evidence of exploitation of extinct megafauna by humans is rare, though megafauna exploitation has been documented at a number of sites. Fishtail points rapidly disappeared after the extinction of the megafauna, and were replaced by other styles more suited to hunting smaller prey. Some authors have proposed the "Broken Zig-Zag" model, where human hunting and climate change causing a reduction in open habitats preferred by megafauna were synergistic factors in megafauna extinction in South America. 2136: 7860: 2030: 8690: 8756: 9249:

allows the cold soils that are unable to support large herbivores today. Today, in the arctic, where trucks have broken the permafrost grasses and diverse flora and fauna can be supported. In addition, Chapin (Chapin 1980) showed that simply adding fertilizer to the soil in Alaska could make grasses grow again like they did in the era of the mammoth steppe. Possibly, the extinction of the megafauna and the corresponding loss of dung is what led to low nutrient levels in modern-day soil and therefore is why the landscape can no longer support megafauna.

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reduced and less predictable rainfall limiting the availability of plants necessary for energy and nutrition. It has been suggested that this change in rainfall restricted the amount of time favorable for reproduction. This could disproportionately harm large animals, since they have longer, more inflexible mating periods, and so may have produced young at unfavorable seasons (i.e., when sufficient food, water, or shelter was unavailable because of shifts in the growing season). In contrast, small mammals, with their shorter

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among various mammal species. This theory could potentially explain the prevalence of heterozygosity at codon 129 of the prion protein gene in humans, which has been speculated to be the result of natural selection against homozygous genotypes that were more susceptible to prion disease and thus potentially a tell-tale of a major prion pandemic that affected humans of or younger than reproductive age far in the past and disproportionately killed before they could reproduce those with homozygous genotypes at codon 129.

3621: 3606: 7922:. By the late Pleistocene, the C4 plant dietary component had decreased considerably. This shift may have been caused by increasingly arid conditions, which may have caused dietary restrictions. Other isotopic analyses of eggshells and wombat teeth also point to a decline of C4 vegetation after 45 Ka. This decline in C4 vegetation is coincident with increasing aridity. Increasingly arid conditions in southeastern Australia during the late Pleistocene may have stressed megafauna, and contributed to their decline. 3516: 20363: 8707: 3684: 8599:

Yet it is surely a marvellous fact, and one that has hardly been sufficiently dwelt upon, this sudden dying out of so many large mammalia, not in one place only but over half the land surface of the globe. We cannot but believe that there must have been some physical cause for this great change; and it must have been a cause capable of acting almost simultaneously over large portions of the earth's surface, and one which, as far as the Tertiary period at least is concerned, was of an exceptional character.

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lumped in the Pleistocene extinction model. Also, the control of population sizes by predators is not fully supported by observations of modern ecosystems. The hypothesis further assumes decreases in vegetation due to climate change, but deglaciation doubled the habitable area of North America. Any vegetational changes that did occur failed to cause almost any extinctions of small vertebrates, and they are more narrowly distributed on average, which detractors cite as evidence against the hypothesis.

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lead author of the study, "these extinctions did not happen continuously and at constant pace. Instead, bursts of extinctions are detected across different continents at times when humans first reached them. More recently, the magnitude of human driven extinctions has picked up the pace again, this time on a global scale." On a related note, the population declines of still extant megafauna during the Pleistocene have also been shown to correlate with human expansion rather than climate change.

6592: 3666: 3726: 3444: 1959: 3636: 7940: 1386: 6698: 20352: 8425: 2093: 7926: 3402: 20889: 7782: 3767: 8905:, would have fared worse than small mammals. A study covering the past 56,000 years indicates that rapid warming events with temperature changes of up to 16 °C (29 °F) had an important impact on the extinction of megafauna. Ancient DNA and radiocarbon data indicates that local genetic populations were replaced by others within the same species or by others within the same genus. Survival of populations was dependent on the existence of 3431: 3480: 7824: 3752: 3561: 3531: 235: 1406: 138: 86: 45: 3700: 8769:

majority of North American taxa have too sparse a fossil record to accurately assess the frequency of human hunting of them. A study by Surovell and Grund concluded "archaeological sites dating to the time of the coexistence of humans and extinct fauna are rare. Those that preserve bone are considerably more rare, and of those, only a very few show unambiguous evidence of human hunting of any type of prey whatsoever."

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indicates that all of the extinctions took place in the same short time period, which was the time when humans entered the landscape. The main mechanism for extinction was probably fire (started by humans) in a then much less fire-adapted landscape. Isotopic evidence shows sudden changes in the diet of surviving species, which could correspond to the stress they experienced before extinction.

1975: 286:(typically defined as animal species having body masses over 44 kilograms (97 lb)), which resulted in a collapse in faunal density and diversity across the globe. The extinctions during the Late Pleistocene are differentiated from previous extinctions by its extreme size bias towards large animals (with small animals being largely unaffected), and widespread absence of 8783: 8791: 9345:, their hunting and other associated ecological impacts led to the extinction of many megafaunal species there. Calculations suggest that this extinction decreased methane production by about 9.6 million tons per year. This suggests that the absence of megafaunal methane emissions may have contributed to the abrupt climatic cooling at the onset of the 8970:

Woolly mammoths became extirpated from Beringia because of climatic factors, although human activity also played a synergistic role in their decline. In North America, a Radiocarbon-dated Event-Count (REC) modelling study found that megafaunal declines in North America correlated with climatic changes instead of human population expansion.

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species worldwide became extinct, rising to 72% in North America, 83% in South America and 88% in Australia, with all mammals over 1,000 kilograms (2,200 lb) becoming extinct in Australia and the Americas, and around 80% globally. Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia experienced more moderate extinctions than other regions.

3367:. The relative importance of human and climactic factors in the North American extinctions has been the subject of significant controversy. Extinctions totalled around 35 genera. The radiocarbon record for North America south of the Alaska-Yukon region has been described as "inadequate" to construct a reliable chronology. 6531:

Pleistocene, when humans first entered North America, these large animals had been geographically separated from intensive human hunting for more than 200,000 years. Given this enormous span of geologic time, bison would almost certainly have been very nearly as naive as native North American large mammals.

9173:, respectively) unaffected. It would need to be capable of killing off flightless birds while leaving closely related flighted species unaffected. Yet while remaining sufficiently selective to afflict only individual species within genera it must be capable of fatally infecting across such clades as birds, 9324:

could have emitted 520 million tons of methane to the atmosphere annually, contributing to the warmer climate of the time (up to 10 °C warmer than at present). This large emission follows from the enormous estimated biomass of sauropods, and because methane production of individual herbivores is

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Megafauna play a significant role in the lateral transport of mineral nutrients in an ecosystem, tending to translocate them from areas of high to those of lower abundance. They do so by their movement between the time they consume the nutrient and the time they release it through elimination (or, to

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rather than the other way around. Alaska now has low nutrient soil unable to support bison, mammoths, and horses. R. Dale Guthrie has claimed this as a cause of the extinction of the megafauna there; however, he may be interpreting it backwards. The loss of large herbivores to break up the permafrost

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diseases into vulnerable populations of native mammals, eventually causing extinctions. The extinction was biased toward larger-sized species because smaller species have greater resilience because of their life history traits (e.g., shorter gestation time, greater population sizes, etc.). Humans are

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It is clear, therefore, that we are now in an altogether exceptional period of the earth's history. We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared; and it is, no doubt, a much better world for us now they have gone.

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The timing of extinctions on the Indian subcontinent is uncertain due to a lack of reliable dating. Similar issues have been reported for Chinese sites, though there is no evidence for any of the megafaunal taxa having survived into the Holocene in that region. Extinctions in Southeast Asia and South

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until 4,000 to 7,000 years ago, as well as on Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic. Additionally, large mammals should have been able to migrate, permanently or seasonally, if they found the temperature too extreme, the breeding season too short, or the rainfall too sparse or unpredictable. Seasons

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horses still living in those same environments. They find a sufficient mix of food to avoid toxins, they extract enough nutrition from forage to reproduce effectively and the timing of their gestation is not an issue. Of course, this criticism ignores the obvious fact that present-day horses are not

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However, this hypothesis has been criticised on the grounds that the multispecies model produces a mass extinction through indirect competition between herbivore species: small species with high reproductive rates subsidize predation on large species with low reproductive rates. All prey species are

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Circumstantially, the close correlation in time between the appearance of humans in an area and extinction there provides weight for this scenario. Radiocarbon dating has supported the plausibility of this correlation being reflective of causation. The megafaunal extinctions covered a vast period of

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of previously established faunal relationships and habitats as a consequence. The timing and severity of the extinctions varied by region and are thought to have been driven by varying combinations of human and climatic factors. Human impact on megafauna populations is thought to have been driven by

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periods, could have adjusted to the increased unpredictability of the climate, both as individuals and as species which allowed them to synchronize their reproductive efforts with conditions favorable for offspring survival. If so, smaller mammals would have lost fewer offspring and would have been

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The extinction's extreme bias towards larger animals further supports a relationship with human activity rather than climate change. There is evidence that the average size of mammalian fauna declined over the course of the Quaternary, a phenomenon that was likely linked to disproportionate hunting

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It is impossible to reflect without the deepest astonishment, on the changed state of . Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters, like the southern parts of Africa, but now we find only the tapir, guanaco, armadillo, capybara; mere pigmies compared to antecedents races... Since their loss,

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and natural climate change had a combined impact. Overall, there is a great deal of evidence for humans being the culprit, but by ruling out climate change completely as a cause of the Australian megafauna extinction we are not getting the whole picture. The climate change in Australia 45,000 years

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The third hypothesis shared by some scientists is that human impacts and natural climate changes led to the extinction of Australian megafauna. About 75% of Australia is semi-arid or arid, so it makes sense that megafauna species used the same fresh water resources as humans. This competition could

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The Late Pleistocene saw the extinction of many mammals weighing more than 40 kilograms (88 lb), including around 80% of mammals over 1 tonne. The proportion of megafauna extinctions is progressively larger the further the human migratory distance from Africa, with the highest extinction rates

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suggest that the last deglaciation may have been markedly different from previous ones. Also, one study suggests that the Pleistocene megafaunal composition may have differed markedly from that of earlier interglacials, making the Pleistocene populations particularly vulnerable to changes in their

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Evidence in Southeast Asia, in contrast to Europe, Australia, and the Americas, suggests that climate change and an increasing sea level were significant factors in the extinction of several herbivorous species. Alterations in vegetation growth and new access routes for early humans and mammals to

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food and better able to deal with anti-herbivory toxins. So, in general, when vegetation becomes more specialized, herbivores with less diet flexibility may be less able to find the mix of vegetation they need to sustain life and reproduce, within a given area. Increased continentality resulted in

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found that human population size and/or specific human activities, not climate change, caused rapidly rising global mammal extinction rates during the past 126,000 years. Around 96% of all mammalian extinctions over this time period are attributable to human impacts. According to Tobias Andermann,

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appear to have succumbed sooner on the Australian mainland than on Tasmania, which was colonised by humans a few thousand years later. A study published in 2015 supported the hypothesis further by running several thousand scenarios that correlated the time windows in which each species is known to

6526:), which may have helped them elude hunters. More difficult to explain in the context of overkill is the survival of bison, since these animals first appeared in North America less than 240,000 years ago and so were geographically removed from human predators for a sizeable period of time. Because 8849:

The second-order predation hypothesis has been supported by a computer model, the Pleistocene extinction model (PEM), which, using the same assumptions and values for all variables (herbivore population, herbivore recruitment rates, food needed per human, herbivore hunting rates, etc.) other than

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The Second-Order Predation Hypothesis says that as humans entered the New World they continued their policy of killing predators, which had been successful in the Old World but because they were more efficient and because the fauna, both herbivores and carnivores, were more naive, they killed off

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points out that the birthrate in hunter-gatherer societies is generally too low, that too much effort is involved in the bringing down of a large animal by a hunting party, and that in order for hunter-gatherers to have brought about the extinction of megafauna simply by hunting them to death, an

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and bison were hunted, despite the fact that, for example, camels and horses are very frequently reported in fossil history. Overkill proponents, however, say this is due to the fast extinction process in North America and the low probability of animals with signs of butchery to be preserved. The

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first landed in Australia, and thus that the two groups coexisted for a long time. Evidence of these animals existing at that time come from fossil records and ocean sediment. To begin with, sediment core drilled in the Indian Ocean off the SW coast of Australia indicate the existence of a fungus

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into these regions. Extinctions in northern Eurasia were staggered over tens of thousands of years between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, while extinctions in the Americas were virtually simultaneous, spanning only 3000 years at most. Overall, during the Late Pleistocene about 65% of all megafaunal

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Vershinina AO, Heintzman PD, Froese DG, Zazula G, Cassatt-Johnstone M, Dalén L, Der Sarkissian C, Dunn SG, Ermini L, Gamba C, Groves P, Kapp JD, Mann DH, Seguin-Orlando A, Southon J (December 2021). "Ancient horse genomes reveal the timing and extent of dispersals across the Bering Land Bridge".

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available to infect. Second, the pathogen must have a high infection rate, such that it is able to infect virtually all individuals of all ages and sexes encountered. Third, it must be extremely lethal, with a mortality rate of c. 50–75%. Finally, it must have the ability to infect multiple host

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that was capable of infecting a large number of species was the culprit. Animals weakened by this "superprion" would also have easily become reservoirs of viral and bacterial diseases as they succumbed to neurological degeneration from the prion, causing a cascade of different diseases to spread

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South America suffered among the worst losses of the continents, with around 83% of its megafauna going extinct. These extinctions postdate the arrival of modern humans in South America around 15,000 years ago. Both human and climatic factors have been attributed as factors in the extinctions by

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Stinnesbeck SR, Frey E, Olguín JA, Stinnesbeck W, Zell P, Mallison H, González AG, Núñez EA, Morlet AV (1 June 2017). "Xibalbaonyx oviceps, a new megalonychid ground sloth (Folivora, Xenarthra) from the Late Pleistocene of the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, and its paleobiogeographic significance".

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The extermination of megafauna left many niches vacant, which has been cited as an explanation for the vulnerability and fragility of many ecosystems to destruction in the later Holocene extinction. The comparative lack of megafauna in modern ecosystems has reduced high-order interactions among

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Some evidence weighs against climate change as a valid hypothesis as applied to Australia. It has been shown that the prevailing climate at the time of extinction (40,000–50,000 BP) was similar to that of today, and that the extinct animals were strongly adapted to an arid climate. The evidence

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Studies propose that the annual mean temperature of the current interglacial that we have seen for the last 10,000 years is no higher than that of previous interglacials, yet most of the same large mammals survived similar temperature increases. In addition, numerous species such as mammoths on

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In Beringia, megafauna may have gone extinct because of particularly intense paludification and because the land connection between Eurasia and North America flooded before the Cordilleran Ice Sheet retreated far enough to reopen the corridor between Beringia and the remainder of North America.

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One consequence of the colonisation by humans of lands previously uninhabited by them may have been the introduction of new fire regimes because of extensive fire use by humans. There is evidence that anthropogenic fire use had major impacts on the local environments in both Australia and North

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evolved into living bison, there was no continent-wide extinction of bison at the end of the Pleistocene (although the genus was regionally extirpated in many areas). The survival of bison into the Holocene and recent times is therefore inconsistent with the overkill scenario. By the end of the

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cycles in prey populations. Prey populations expand and consequently overgraze and over-browse the land. Soon the environment is no longer able to support them. As a result, many herbivores starve. Species that rely on the slowest recruiting food become extinct, followed by species that cannot

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David B, Arnold LJ, Delannoy JJ, Fresløv J, Urwin C, Petchey F, McDowell MC, Mullett R, Mialanes J, Wood R, Crouch J, Berthet J, Wong VN, Green H, Hellstrom J, GunaiKurnai Land, Waters Aboriginal Corporation (1 February 2021). "Late survival of megafauna refuted for Cloggs Cave, SE Australia:

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living at South Walker Creek 40,000 years ago, therefore no human cause can be attributed to the extinction of these megafauna. However, there is evidence of major environmental deterioration of South Water Creek 40,000 years ago, which may have caused the extinct event. These changes include

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appears inconsistent with the climate change hypothesis. Over a span of several thousand years prior to their extinction in the area, the mastodons show a trend of declining age at maturation. This is the opposite of what one would expect if they were experiencing stresses from deteriorating

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despite changes in climate. This would not be expected if climate change were responsible (unless their maritime climates offered some protection against climate change not afforded to coastal populations on the mainland). Under normal ecological assumptions island populations should be more

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of North America before contact with European settlers. The study estimated that the removal of the bison caused a decrease of as much as 2.2 million tons per year. Another study examined the change in the methane concentration in the atmosphere at the end of the Pleistocene epoch after the

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An extraterrestrial impact, which has occasionally been proposed as a cause of the Younger Dryas, has been suggested by some authors as a potential cause of the extinction of North America's megafauna due to the temporal proximity between a proposed date for such an impact and the following

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explaining the extinction are automatically to be preferred by default, however, any more than weaknesses in climate change arguments can be taken as supporting overkill. Some form of a combination of both factors could be plausible, and overkill would be a lot easier to achieve large-scale

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to kill large animals. The chief criticism of the "prehistoric overkill hypothesis" has been that the human population at the time was too small and/or not sufficiently widespread geographically to have been capable of such ecologically significant impacts. This criticism does not mean that

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The original debates as to whether human arrival times or climate change constituted the primary cause of megafaunal extinctions necessarily were based on paleontological evidence coupled with geological dating techniques. Recently, genetic analyses of surviving megafaunal populations have

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could have placed enough thermal stress on cold-adapted mammals to cause them to die. Their heavy fur, which helps conserve body heat in the glacial cold, might have prevented the dumping of excess heat, causing the mammals to die of heat exhaustion. Large mammals, with their reduced

7982:), the sudden and extensive spate of extinctions occurred earlier than in the rest of the world. Most evidence points to a 20,000 year period after human arrival circa 63,000 BCE, but scientific argument continues as to the exact date range. In the rest of the Pacific (other 976:

The increased extent of extinction mirrors the migration pattern of modern humans: the further away from Africa, the more recently humans inhabited the area, the less time those environments (including its megafauna) had to become accustomed to humans (and vice versa).

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contributed new evidence, leading to the conclusion: "The inability of climate to predict the observed population decline of megafauna, especially during the past 75,000 years, implies that human impact became the main driver of megafauna dynamics around this date."

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Mitchell KJ, Bover P, Salis AT, Mudge C, Heiniger H, Thompson M, Hockett B, Weyrich LS, Cooper A, Meachen JA (20 February 2023). "Evidence for Pleistocene gene flow through the ice-free corridor from extinct horses and camels from Natural Trap Cave, Wyoming".

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used fire agriculture to burn impassable land. This further diminished the already disappearing grassland which contained plants that were a key dietary component of herbivorous megafauna. While there is no scientific consensus on this, it is plausible that

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have become extinct with the arrival of humans on different continents or islands. This was compared against climate reconstructions for the last 90,000 years. The researchers found correlations of human spread and species extinction indicating that the

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various authors. Although some megafauna has been historically suggested to have survived into the early Holocene based on radiocarbon dates this may be the result of dating errors due to contamination. The extinctions are coincident with the end of the

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Although Africa was one of the least affected regions, the region still suffered extinctions, particularly around the Late Pleistocene-Holocene transition. These extinctions were likely predominantly climatically driven by changes to grassland habitats.

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Rivals F (2006). "Découverte de Capra caucasica et d'Hemitragus cedrensis (Mammalia, Bovidae) dans les niveaux du Pléistocène supérieur de la Caune de l'Arago (Tautavel, France): Implication biochronologique dans le contexte du Bassin Méditerranéen".

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Boom-bust cycles in herbivore populations change the nature of the vegetative environment, with consequent climatic impacts on relative humidity and continentality. Through overgrazing and overbrowsing, mixed parkland becomes grassland, and climatic

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Major objections have been raised regarding the hunting hypothesis. Notable among them is the sparsity of evidence of human hunting of megafauna. There is no archeological evidence that in North America megafauna other than mammoths, mastodons,

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Some evidence from Europe also suggests climatic changes were responsible for extinctions there, as the individuals extinctions tended to occur during times of environmental change and did not correlate particularly well with human migrations.

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O'Keefe FR, Dunn RE, Weitzel EM, Waters MR, Martinez LN, Binder WJ, Southon JR, Cohen JE, Meachen JA, DeSantis LR, Kirby ME, Ghezzo E, Coltrain JB, Fuller BT, Farrell AB, Takeuchi GT, MacDonald G, Davis EB, Lindsey EL (18 August 2023).

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In southeastern Australia, the scarcity of water during the interval in which humans arrived in Australia suggests that human competition with megafauna for precious water sources may have played a role in the extinction of the latter.

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Münzel SC, Rivals F, Pacher M, Döppes D, Rabeder G, Conard NJ, Bocherens H (7 August 2014). "Behavioural ecology of Late Pleistocene bears (Ursus spelaeus, Ursus ingressus): Insight from stable isotopes (C, N, O) and tooth microwear".

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in the New World, existing predators must share the prey populations with this new predator. Because of this competition, populations of original, or first-order, predators cannot find enough food; they are in direct competition with

8638:, portrays this process as relatively quick. Some of the direct evidence for this includes: fossils of some megafauna found in conjunction with human remains, embedded arrows and tool cut marks found in megafaunal bones, and European 7836:

A scarcity of reliably dated megafaunal bone deposits has made it difficult to construct timelines for megafaunal extinctions in certain areas, leading to a divide among researches about when and how megafaunal species went extinct.

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Sanders, A.E., R.E. Weems, L.B. Albright III (2009). "Formalization of the mid-Pleistocene "Ten Mile Hill beds" in South Carolina with evidence for placement of the Irvingtonian–Rancholabrean boundary". In Albright III, L.B. (ed.).

964: 6474:); the list of survivors also include species which were extirpated during the Quaternary extinction event, but recolonised at least part of their ranges during the mid-Holocene from South American relict populations, such as the 16219:

Rabanus-Wallace MT, Wooller MJ, Zazula GD, Shute E, Jahren AH, Kosintsev P, Burns JA, Breen J, Llamas B, Cooper A (2017). "Megafaunal isotopes reveal role of increased moisture on rangeland during late Pleistocene extinctions".

9399:, extinction begins, or if they should be considered separate events at all. Some authors have argued that the activities of earlier archaic humans have also resulted in extinctions, though the evidence for this is equivocal. 8732:

was the main cause of the extinction, while climate change exacerbated the frequency of extinctions. The study, however, found an apparently low extinction rate in the fossil record of mainland Asia. A 2020 study published in

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to places where there is apt to be water. Large animals also store more fat in their bodies than do medium-sized animals and this should have allowed them to compensate for extreme seasonal fluctuations in food availability.

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and woodland. This may have affected the kinds of food available. Shorter growing seasons may have caused the extinction of large herbivores and the dwarfing of many others. In this case, as observed, bison and other large

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to extinction, which in turn caused the extinction of carnivores and scavengers which had preyed upon those animals. This hypothesis holds Pleistocene humans responsible for the megafaunal extinction. One variant, known as

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with projectile points embedded in their skeletons, by observations of modern naive animals allowing hunters to approach easily and by computer models by Mosimann and Martin, and Whittington and Dyke, and most recently by

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Ghezzo E, Boscaini A, Madurell-Malapeira J, Rook L (16 December 2014). "Lynx remains from the Pleistocene of Valdemino cave (Savona, Northwestern Italy), and the oldest occurrence of Lynx spelaeus (Carnivora, Felidae)".

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and 10,000 BP, a 6 °C increase in global mean annual temperatures occurred. This was generally thought to be the cause of the extinctions. According to this hypothesis, a temperature increase sufficient to melt the

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in the evolutionary history of many of the megafauna, it is rather implausible that only after the last glacial maximum would there be such extinctions. Proponents of climate change as the extinction event's cause like

10600:

Jukar AM, Patnaik R, Chauhan PR, Li HC, Lin JP (10 September 2019). "The youngest occurrence of Hexaprotodon Falconer and Cautley, 1836 (Hippopotamidae, Mammalia) from South Asia with a discussion on its extinction".

17973:

Bunch TE, Hermes RE, Moore AM, Kennett DJ, Weaver JC, Wittke JH, DeCarli PS, Bischoff JL, Hillman GC, Howard GA, Kimbel DR, Kletetschka G, Lipo CP, Sakai S, Revay Z, West A, Firestone RB, Kennett JP (10 July 2012).

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availability is thought to limit productivity in much of the region, the decrease in its transport from the western part of the basin and from floodplains (both of which derive their supply from the uplift of the

1027:

for thousands of years after they had vanished from the continental shores of the north Pacific. The later disappearance of these island species correlates with the later colonization of these islands by humans.

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during the 1960s. By the end of the 20th century, two "camps" of researchers had emerged on the topic, one supporting climate change, the other supporting human hunting as the primary cause of the extinctions.

18979: 18049: 17980: 16952: 16668: 16599: 14934: 9678: 9013:

Critics have also identified a number of problems with the continentality hypotheses. Megaherbivores have prospered at other times of continental climate. For example, megaherbivores thrived in Pleistocene

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extinctions. Evidence supporting the prehistoric overkill hypothesis includes the persistence of megafauna on some islands for millennia past the disappearance of their continental cousins. For instance,

10982:

Sanz M, Daura J, Brugal JP (1 January 2014). "First occurrence of the extinct deer Haploidoceros in the Iberian Peninsula in the Upper Pleistocene of the Cova del Rinoceront (Castelldefels, Barcelona)".

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However, more recent authors have viewed it as more likely that the collapse of the mammoth steppe was driven by climatic warming, which in turn impacted the megafauna, rather than the other way around.

1035:

Recent research indicates that each species responded differently to environmental changes, and no one factor by itself explains the large variety of extinctions. The causes may involve the interplay of

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thought to be the cause because other earlier immigrations of mammals into North America from Eurasia did not cause extinctions. A similar suggestion is that pathogens were transmitted by the expanding

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is unlikely to have caused extinction. The disease would need to be implausibly selective while being simultaneously implausibly broad. Such a disease needs to be capable of killing off wolves such as

8973:

In the North American Great Lakes region, the population declines of mastodons and mammoths have been found to correlate with climatic fluctuations during the Younger Dryas rather than human activity.

17055:

Andersen, S. T. (1973). "The differential pollen productivity of trees and its significance for the interpretation of a pollen diagram from a forested region". In Birks, H.J.B., West, R.G. (eds.).

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competing for resources with ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, camels, llamas, and bison. Similarly, mammoths survived the Pleistocene Holocene transition on isolated, uninhabited islands in the

9145:

As with other hypotheses, a number of counterarguments to the hyperdisease hypothesis have been put forth. Generally speaking, disease has to be very virulent to kill off all the individuals in a

11520:

Cirilli O, Machado H, Arroyo-Cabrales J, Barrón-Ortiz CI, Davis E, Jass CN, Jukar AM, Landry Z, Marín-Leyva AH, Pandolfi L, Pushkina D, Rook L, Saarinen J, Scott E, Semprebon G (24 August 2022).

9080:

The hyperdisease hypothesis, as advanced by Ross D. E. MacFee and Preston A. Marx, attributes the extinction of large mammals during the late Pleistocene to indirect effects of the newly arrived

2183:. Extinctions were more severe in Northern Eurasia than in Africa or South and Southeast Asia. These extinctions were staggered over tens of thousands of years, spanning from around 50,000 years 18043:

Firestone RB, West A, Kennett JP, Becker L, Bunch TE, Revay ZS, Schultz PH, Belgya T, Kennett DJ, Erlandson JM, Dickenson OJ, Goodyear AC, Harris RS, Howard GA, Kloosterman JB (9 October 2007).

11018:

Rivals F, Sanz M, Daura J (1 May 2016). "First reconstruction of the dietary traits of the Mediterranean deer (Haploidoceros mediterraneus) from the Cova del Rinoceront (NE Iberian Peninsula)".

968:

The proportion of extinct large mammal species (more than or equal to 10 kg (22 lb)) in each country during the last 132,000 years, only counting extinctions earlier than 1000 years BP

295:

hunting ("overkill"), as well as possibly environmental alteration. The relative importance of human vs climatic factors in the extinctions has been the subject of long-running controversy.

19042:

Galetti M, Moleón M, Jordano P, Pires MM, Guimarães PR, Pape T, Nichols E, Hansen D, Olesen JM, Munk M, de Mattos JS, Schweiger AH, Owen-Smith N, Johnson CN, Marquis RJ (9 October 2017).

10652: 14654:

S.F. Vizcaíno, R.A. Fariña, J.C. Fernicola Young Darwin and the ecology and extinction of Pleistocene South American fossil mammals Rev. Asoc. Geol. Argent., 64 (1) (2009), pp. 160-169

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Prevosti FJ, Tonni EP, Bidegain JC (1 December 2009). "Stratigraphic range of the large canids (Carnivora, Canidae) in South America, and its relevance to quaternary biostratigraphy".

11252:

Marciszak A, Schouwenburg C, Lipecki G, Talamo S, Shpansky A, Malikov D, Gornig W (1 December 2019). "Steppe brown bear Ursus arctos "priscus" from the Late Pleistocene of Europe".

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ago destabilized the ecosystem, making it particularly vulnerable to hunting and fire agriculture by humans; this is probably what led to the extinction of the Australian megafauna.

13788:

Jones W, Rinderknecht A, Alvarenga H, Montenegro F, Ubilla M (30 December 2017). "The last terror birds (Aves, Phorusrhacidae): new evidence from the late Pleistocene of Uruguay".

7902:

Several studies provide evidence that climate change caused megafaunal extinction during the Pleistocene in Australia. One group of researchers analyzed fossilized teeth found at

6522:). All save the pronghorns and giant anteaters were descended from Asian ancestors that had evolved with human predators. Pronghorns are the second-fastest land mammal (after the 9068:

grazers survived. However, a broader variation of the overkill hypothesis may predict this, because changes in vegetation wrought by either Second Order Predation (see below) or

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to stressors. Many extant species of plants have adaptations that were advantageous in the presence of megafauna but are now useless in their absence. The demise of megafaunal

9125:

If a disease was indeed responsible for the end-Pleistocene extinctions, then there are several criteria it must satisfy (see Table 7.3 in MacPhee & Marx 1997). First, the

7918:

texture analysis, they assessed megafaunal diets and vegetation. During the middle Pleistocene, southeastern Australia was dominated by browsers, including fauna that consumed

18394:

Webber, P.J., Miller, P.C., Chapin, F.S. III, MacCown, B.H. (1980). "The vegetation: pattern and succession". In Brown, J., Miller, P.C., Tieszen, L.L., Bunnell, F.L. (eds.).

18191:

Holliday VT, Daulton TL, Bartlein PJ, Boslough MB, Breslawski RP, Fisher AE, Jorgeson IA, Scott AC, Koeberl C, Marlon JR, Severinghaus J, Petaev MI, Claeys P (December 2023).

12098: 18909:

Tóth AB, Lyons SK, Barr WA, Behrensmeyer AK, Blois JL, Bobe R, Davis M, Du A, Eronen JT, Faith JT, Fraser D, Gotelli NJ, Graves GR, Jukar AM, Miller JH (20 September 2019).

8678:

without the earliest humans. The overkill hypothesis, a variant of the hunting hypothesis, was proposed in 1966 by Paul S. Martin, Professor of Geosciences Emeritus at the

9096:, with some going extinct. The hyperdisease hypothesis proposes that humans or animals traveling with them (e.g., chickens or domestic dogs) introduced one or more highly 7768: 16084:

Scott, E. (2010). "Extinctions, scenarios, and assumptions: Changes in latest Pleistocene large herbivore abundance and distribution in western North America". Quat. Int.

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Extinctions in North America were concentrated at the end of the Late Pleistocene, around 13,800–11,400 years Before Present, which were coincident with the onset of the

14622:

Bayly IA (1993). "The fauna of athalassic saline waters in Australia and the Altiplano of South America: Comparisons and historical perspectives". In Hurlbert SH (ed.).

13715:

Suárez W, Olson SL (1 September 2014). "A new fossil species of small crested caracara (Aves: Falconidae: Caracara) from the Pacific lowlands of western South America".

12176: 8976:

In the Argentine Pampas, the flooding of vast swathes of the once much larger Pampas grasslands may have played a role in the extinctions of its megafaunal assemblages.

15223: 11201:

Lu D, Yang Y, Li Q, Ni X (30 July 2021). "A late Pleistocene fossil from Northeastern China is the first record of the dire wolf (Carnivora: Canis dirus) in Eurasia".

3330: 17: 12047:

McDonald HG, Chatters JC, Gaudin TJ (4 May 2017). "A new genus of megalonychid ground sloth (Mammalia, Xenarthra) from the late Pleistocene of Quintana Roo, Mexico".

10311:

Lan T, Lindqvist C (2018). "Paleogenomics: Genome-Scale Analysis of Ancient DNA and Population and Evolutionary Genomic Inferences". In Lindqvist C, Rajora O (eds.).

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Anthony D. Barnosky, Paul L. Koch, Robert S. Feranec, Scott L. Wing, Alan B. Shabel (2004). "Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents".

8297: 7175: 19323:

Perry GL, Wheeler AB, Wood JR, Wilmshurst JM (1 December 2014). "A high-precision chronology for the rapid extinction of New Zealand moa (Aves, Dinornithiformes)".

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Guthrie, R. D. (1989). "Mosaics, allochemics, and nutrients: an ecological theory of Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions". In Martin, P.S., Klein, R.G. (eds.).

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There are some inconsistencies between the current available data and the prehistoric overkill hypothesis. For instance, there are ambiguities around the timing of

11134:

Equids in time and space. Papers in honour of Véra Eisenmann. Proceedings of the 9th conference of the International Council of Archaeozoology, Durham, August 2002

7182: 2904: 9612: 9456: 9236:

seen in many megafaunal species and nor is there evidence for extreme radio-isotopic changes during the event. Considering these factors, causation is unlikely.

6034: 17018:

Scott, E. (2010). "Extinctions, scenarios, and assumptions: Changes in latest Pleistocene large herbivore abundance and distribution in western North America".

6725: 6340: 3354: 17566:

Roberts RG, Flannery TF, Ayliffe LK, et al. (June 2001). "New ages for the last Australian megafauna: continent-wide extinction about 46,000 years ago".

9270:) to other areas is thought to have significantly impacted the region's ecology, and the effects may not yet have reached their limits. The extinction of the 9057:

environmental conditions, but is consistent with a reduction in intraspecific competition that would result from a population being reduced by human hunting.

19732: 19429: 17749: 10244:"Worldwide Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene population declines in extant megafauna are associated with Homo sapiens expansion rather than climate change" 7659: 7652: 6062: 17493: 13831:

Alvarenga H, Jones W, Rinderknecht A (1 May 2010). "The youngest record of phorusrhacid birds (Aves, Phorusrhacidae) from the late Pleistocene of Uruguay".

8966:

In Australia, some studies have suggested that extinctions of megafauna began before the peopling of the continent, favouring climate change as the driver.

11205:. Cave Deposits from Luotuo Hill, Northeast China: A Geochronologically Calibrated Mammalian Biostratigraphic Standard for the Quaternary of Eastern Asia. 9847: 9261:, it is estimated that such lateral diffusion was reduced over 98% following the megafaunal extinctions that occurred roughly 12,500 years ago. Given that 8884:

ages, and that they were somehow associated with the prevalence or disappearance of certain animals, they surmised that the termination of the Pleistocene

8609:

The geographical distribution of animals; with a study of the relations of living and extinct faunas as elucidating the past changes of the Earth's surface

7745: 6076: 13758: 12860: 12805: 12282: 7990:) although in some respects far later, endemic fauna also usually perished quickly upon the arrival of humans in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. 14404: 13489: 13080: 11953: 10451:

Turvey ST, Tong H, Stuart AJ, Lister AM (September 2013). "Holocene survival of Late Pleistocene megafauna in China: a critical review of the evidence".

7772: 7633: 7624: 6318: 2496: 19442: 15224:"Robustness despite uncertainty: regional climate data reveal the dominant role of humans in explaining global extinctions of Late Quaternary megafauna" 18409:

Dehasque M, Pečnerová P, Muller H, Tikhonov A, Nikolskiy P, Tsigankova VI, Danilov GK, Díez-del-Molino D, Vartanyan S, Dalén L, Lister AM (May 2021).

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McDonald, J. (1989). "The reordered North American selection regime and late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions". In Martin, P.S., Klein, R.G. (eds.).

1954:) formerly inhabited Europe as far north as Great Britain at the beginning of the Late Pleistocene, becoming extinct in Europe around 30,000 years ago 14008:

Price GJ, Zhao Jx, Feng YX, Hocknull SA (1 February 2009). "New U/Th ages for Pleistocene megafauna deposits of southeastern Queensland, Australia".

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but the taxonomy of these horses is unclear, and many of these species may be synonymous with each other, perhaps only representing a single species.

1792: 1557: 14481: 10108:"The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene" 7776: 7615: 7497: 17515:

Prideaux GJ, Long JA, Ayliffe LK, et al. (January 2007). "An arid-adapted middle Pleistocene vertebrate fauna from south-central Australia".

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Youngman PM (1 March 1986). "The extinct short-faced skunk Brachyprotoma obtusata (Mammalia, Carnivora): first records for Canada and Beringia".

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Dembitzer J, Barkai R, Ben-Dor M, Meiri S (15 January 2022). "Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distribution".

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King, J.E., Saunders, J.J. (1989). "Environmental insularity and the extinction of the American mastodont". In Martin, P.S., Klein R.G. (eds.).

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Whittington, S. L., Dyke, B. (1984). "Simulating overkill: experiment with the Mossiman and Martin model". In Martin, P.S., Klein, R.G. (eds.).

13112:"First record of the Neolicaphrium recens Frenguelli, 1921 (Mammalia, Litopterna) in the Pleistocene of Santiago del Estero Province, Argentina" 20816: 9423: 6683: 11721:

Schubert BW, Chatters JC, Arroyo-Cabrales J, Samuels JX, Soibelzon LH, Prevosti FJ, Widga C, Nava A, Rissolo D, Erreguerena PL (31 May 2019).

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Pennycuick, C.J. (1979). "Energy costs of locomotion and the concept of "Foraging radius"". In Sinclair A.R.E., Norton-Griffiths M. (eds.).

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Whitney-Smith, E. (2004). "Late Pleistocene extinctions through second-order predation". In Barton, C.M., Clark, G.A., Yesner, D.R. (eds.).

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Diamond, J. (1984). "Historic extinctions: a Rosetta stone for understanding prehistoric extinctions". In Martin, P.S., Klein, R.G. (eds.).

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and has been suggested by a few authors as a cause of megafaunal extinctions in the Late Quaternary. The full effects of such events on the

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evidence is also suggestive: the areas of the world where humans evolved currently have more of their Pleistocene megafaunal diversity (the

8616:

Discussion of the topic became more widespread during the 20th century, particularly following the proposal of the "overkill hypothesis" by

13603:"A Peculiar New Pampatheriidae (Mammalia: Xenarthra: Cingulata) from the Pleistocene of Argentina and Comments on Pampatheriidae Diversity" 12772: 8225: 2290: 18514: 16072:

Clovis and Extinctions – Overkill, Second Order Predation, Environmental Degradation in a Non-equilibrium Ecosystem "Clovis Age Continent"

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Stuart AJ (May 2015). "Late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions on the continents: a short review: LATE QUATERNARY MEGAFAUNAL EXTINCTIONS".

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surviving species, reducing ecological complexity. This depauperate, post-megafaunal ecological state has been associated with diminished

19601: 18363:"Tundra plant communities of the Mackenzie mountains, Northwest Territories; floristic characteristics of long term surface disturbances" 13901:"The latest freshwater giants: a new Peltocephalus (Pleurodira: Podocnemididae) turtle from the Late Pleistocene of the Brazilian Amazon" 11522:"Evolution of the Family Equidae, Subfamily Equinae, in North, Central and South America, Eurasia and Africa during the Plio-Pleistocene" 9138:

species without posing a serious threat to humans. Humans may be infected, but the disease must not be highly lethal or able to cause an

7550: 17080:

Ashworth, C.A. (1980). "Environmental implications of a beetle assemblage from the Gervais formation (Early Wisconsinian?), Minnesota".

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Graham, R.W., Lundelius, E.L. (1989). "Coevolutionary disequilibrium and Pleistocene extinctions". In Martin, P.S., Klein, R.G. (eds.).

20873: 18411:"Combining Bayesian age models and genetics to investigate population dynamics and extinction of the last mammoths in northern Siberia" 18045:"Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling" 3382: 18827:

Kelliher FM, Clark, H. (15 March 2010). "Methane emissions from bison—An historic herd estimate for the North American Great Plains".

10817:"Biochronologie et grands mammifères au Pléistocène moyen et supérieur en Europe occidentale: l'Apport des genres hemitragus et capra" 10709:

Watanabe J, Matsuoka H (2 November 2015). "Flightless diving duck (Aves, Anatidae) from the Pleistocene of Shiriya, northeast Japan".

9885:

Prado JL, Martinez-Maza C, Alberdi MT (May 2015). "Megafauna extinction in South America: A new chronology for the Argentine Pampas".

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no very great physical changes can have taken place in the nature of the Country. What then has exterminated so many living creatures?

150: 100: 20650: 19725: 15133:

Turneya CS, Flannery TF, Roberts RG, Reid C, Fifield LK, Higham TF, Jacobs Z, Kemp N, Colhoun EA, Kalin RM, Ogle N (26 August 2008).

14051: 12925:"Dispersal of Pleistocene Equus (Family Equidae) into South America and Calibration of GABI 3 Based on Evidence from Tarija, Bolivia" 9353:, was 2–4 times more rapid than any other decrease in the last half million years, suggesting that an unusual mechanism was at work. 8807:, environmental exhaustion, and environmental collapse. The hypothesis accounts for changes in animal, plant, and human populations. 19495: 11894:

Sanchez G, Holliday VT, Gaines EP, Arroyo-Cabrales J, Martínez-Tagüeña N, Kowler A, Lange T, Hodgins GW, Mentzer SM (29 July 2014).

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The culture that has been connected with the wave of extinctions in North America is the paleo-American culture associated with the

329:

Extinctions range of the continental large and medium-sized mammals from 40,000 to 4,000 years BP in different biogeographic realms

20943: 20698: 12102: 19522: 18169: 14103:

Hocknull SA, Lewis R, Arnold LJ, Pietsch T, Joannes-Boyau R, Price GJ, Moss P, Wood R, Dosseto A, Louys J, Olley J (18 May 2020).

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vulnerable to extinction due to climate change because of small populations and an inability to migrate to more favorable climes.

20933: 20660: 14078: 9386: 17617:

Fisher DC (2009). "Paleobiology and Extinction of Proboscideans in the Great Lakes Region of North America". In Haynes G (ed.).

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lacks widespread support among scholars due to various inconsistencies in the hypothesis, and has been comprehensively refuted.

20800: 20645: 19568: 9407: 9032:, herbivores could have found areas with growing seasons more favorable for finding food and breeding successfully. Modern-day 19106:

Tan HZ, Jansen JJ, Allport GA, Garg KM, Chattopadhyay B, Irestedt M, Pang SE, Chilton G, Gwee CY, Rheindt FE (7 August 2023).

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Nadasdy, Paul (2006). "Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism".

15602: 15550: 15525: 15492: 15014: 14765: 14740: 14715: 14639: 14549: 14522: 14440: 14387: 14360: 14333: 14303: 13582: 13555: 13473: 13400: 13373: 13346: 13319: 13034: 12904: 12427: 12402: 12377: 12350: 12323: 12240: 12213: 11870: 11185: 11158: 11094: 11064: 10934: 10857: 10763: 10693: 10328: 9577: 2203:. Climate change has been considered a probable major factor in the extinctions, possibly in combination with human hunting. 19430:"Lightning Strikes Twice: Blitzkrieg, Hyperdisease, and Global Explanations of the Late Quaternary Catastrophic Extinctions" 17750:"Lightning Strikes Twice: Blitzkrieg, Hyperdisease, and Global Explanations of the Late Quaternary Catastrophic Extinctions" 13309: 11132:

Foronova I (2006). "Late quaternary equids (genus Equus) of South-western and South-central Siberia". In M. Mashkour (ed.).

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Lewis J. Bartlett, David R. Williams, Graham W. Prescott, Andrew Balmford, Rhys E. Green, Anders Eriksson, Paul J. Valdes,

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Putshkov PV (1997). "Were the Mammoths killed by the warming? (Testing of the climatic versions of the Wurm extinctions)".

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state in a reservoir species. That is, it must be able to sustain itself in the environment when there are no susceptible

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Grayson DK, Meltzer DJ (December 2012). "Clovis Hunting and Large Mammal Extinction: A Critical Review of the Evidence".

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Quaternary plant ecology: the 14th symposium of the British Ecological society, University of Cambridge, 28–30 March 1972

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Quaternary plant ecology: the 14th symposium of the British Ecological Society, University of Cambridge, 28–30 March 1972

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Bergman J, Pedersen RØ, Lundgren EJ, Lemoine RT, Monsarrat S, Pearce EA, Schierup MH, Svenning JC (24 November 2023).

20718: 17308: 17153: 17064: 16881:"Population reconstructions for humans and megafauna suggest mixed causes for North American Pleistocene extinctions" 16280: 15908: 15756: 15700: 14539: 12591:"Late Pleistocene South American megafaunal extinctions associated with rise of Fishtail points and human population" 9447: 8891:

The most obvious change associated with the termination of an ice age is the increase in temperature. Between 15,000

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MacFee RD, Marx PA (1997). "Humans, hyperdisease and first-contact extinctions". In Goodman S, Patterson BD (eds.).

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The megafaunal extinctions were already recognized as a distinct phenomenon by some scientists in the 19th century:

20852: 20821: 17622: 16593:

Wroe S, Field JH, Archer M, Grayson DK, Price GJ, Louys J, Faith JT, Webb GE, Davidson I, Mooney SD (28 May 2013).

11148: 9418:. In many cases, it is suggested even minimal hunting pressure was enough to wipe out large fauna, particularly on 9283: 8980: 8912:

Other scientists have proposed that increasingly extreme weather—hotter summers and colder winters—referred to as "

1037: 984: 19433: 18797: 17753: 16802:"Climate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America" 11175: 11054: 4239:) from the Late Pleistocene of North America have historically been assigned to many different species, including 20938: 20630: 20527: 19594: 19358:

Crowley BE (1 September 2010). "A refined chronology of prehistoric Madagascar and the demise of the megafauna".

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in the Arctic that maintained open grassland environments has been highly detrimental to shorebirds of the genus

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Large populations of megaherbivores have the potential to contribute greatly to the atmospheric concentration of

9205: 9198: 9069: 8729: 3647: 14173:

Saltré F, Chadoeuf J, Peters KJ, McDowell MC, Friedrich T, Timmermann A, Ulm S, Bradshaw CJ (22 November 2019).

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Vereshchagin NK, Baryshnikov GF (1 January 1991). "The ecological structure of the "Mammoth Fauna" in Eurasia".

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Ferreira GS, Nascimento ER, Cadena EA, Cozzuol MA, Farina BM, Pacheco ML, Rizzutto MA, Langer MC (March 2024).

13766: 13519: 12868: 12835: 12813: 12290: 8916:", or related changes in rainfall caused the extinctions. It has been shown that vegetation changed from mixed 13497: 13088: 12894: 11961: 10753: 6608: 20857: 19449: 15820: 14874:"Timing of Quaternary megafaunal extinction in South America in relation to human arrival and climate change" 14242:"Dietary responses of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia–New Guinea) megafauna to climate and environmental change" 9006: 8906: 3973: 2555: 10380: 437: 422: 407: 392: 377: 20688: 17668:

Unifying themes in complex systems IV proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Complex Systems

16595:"Climate change frames debate over the extinction of megafauna in Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea)" 8902: 8829:

reduces their numbers to a point where these predators no longer regulate the size of the prey populations.

6735:(a cooling period earlier and less severe than the Northern Hemisphere Younger Dryas) and the emergence of 17976:"Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago" 15275: 11308:. Fossil remains in karst and their role in reconstructing Quaternary paleoclimate and paleoenvironments. 9328:

Recent studies have indicated that the extinction of megafaunal herbivores may have caused a reduction in

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Combination Hypotheses: Climate Change, Overkill + Climate Change, Second-Order Predation + Climate Change

8293:(25% larger than modern species, unclear if it is actually a distinct species from living Tasmanian devil) 7873:

This theory is based on evidence of megafauna surviving until 40,000 years ago, a full 30,000 years after

1421:

China have been proposed to be the result of environmental shift from open to closed forested habitats.

20902: 20773: 19741: 14489: 11686: 10200:

Anderson PK (July 1995). "Competition, Predation, and the Evolution and Extinction of Steller's Sea Cow,

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It may be observed that neither the overkill nor the climate change hypotheses can fully explain events:

1987: 19549: 13051:"Late Pleistocene vertebrates from Touro Passo Creek (Touro Passo Formation), southern Brazil: A review" 10881:

Baryshnikov G, Tikhonov A (1 October 1994). "Notes on skulls of Pleistocene Saiga of Northern Eurasia".

10660: 10057: 9503: 195: 20923: 20421: 19587: 17932: 9746: 9002: 3004: 2120: 2000: 1239: 1228: 18113: 15751: 15695: 15377:"Megafauna extinctions in the late-Quaternary are linked to human range expansion, not climate change" 14873: 14847: 10106:

Svenning JC, Lemoine RT, Bergman J, Buitenwerf R, Le Roux E, Lundgren E, Mungi N, Pedersen RØ (2024).

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are poorly understood, however these explanations have been criticized as they do not account for the

9084:. In more recent times, disease has driven many vulnerable species to extinction; the introduction of 108: 20763: 15260: 9217: 6736: 6711: 5134: 5116: 2986: 2973: 2769: 2412: 1041: 19468: 15879: 9792:

Bird MI, Hutley LB, Lawes MJ, Lloyd J, Luly JG, Ridd PV, Roberts RG, Ulm S, Wurster CM (July 2013).

8755: 20795: 20787: 20683: 20635: 20391: 19532: 17020: 15217: 14878: 14756:

Martin, P. S. (1989). "Prehistoric overkill: A global model". In Martin, P.S., Klein, R.G. (eds.).

11896:"Human (Clovis)–gomphothere (Cuvieronius sp.) association ~13,390 calibrated yBP in Sonora, Mexico" 10344:

Faith JT (January 2014). "Late Pleistocene and Holocene mammal extinctions on continental Africa".

10017: 9402:

This hypothesis is supported by rapid megafaunal extinction following recent human colonisation in

8804: 7103: 4748: 2954: 2869: 2723: 2188: 2140: 1015:

long after North and South American ground sloths were extinct, woolly mammoths died out on remote

18232:"The Role of Geomagnetic Field Intensity in Late Quaternary Evolution of Humans and Large Mammals" 15669: 15479: 15192: 15135:"Late-surviving megafauna in Tasmania, Australia, implicate human involvement in their extinction" 13206:"The fossil American lion ( Panthera atrox ) in South America: Palaeobiogeographical implications" 9341:

extinction of megafauna in the Americas. After early humans migrated to the Americas about 13,000

20733: 20014: 20009: 18864:

Smith FA, Elliot, S. M., Lyons, S. K. (23 May 2010). "Methane emissions from extinct megafauna".

18410: 18337: 18192: 14882:. Faunal Dynamics and Extinction in the Quaternary: Studies in Honor of Ernest L. Lundelius, Jr. 13860:"La posición sistemática de Hermosiornis (Aves, Phororhacoidea) y sus implicancias filogenéticas" 12725: 9478: 9114: 9093: 8486: 8063: 6732: 6548: 6270: 5964: 5486: 2565: 2402: 2192: 1722: 1390: 112: 18911:"Reorganization of surviving mammal communities after the end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction" 18370: 18362: 17204: 12465:

Papers on Geology, Vertebrate Paleontology, and Biostratigraphy in Honor of Michael O. Woodburne

2010: 20600: 20552: 15874: 11687:

Rodriguez-de la Rosa, Ruben A., Guzman Gutierrez, Jose Ruben, Mendoza, Carlos (December 2001).

10012: 9419: 8800: 8321: 7849: 6352: 5632: 4962: 4948: 4708: 4662: 4026: 2965: 2422: 2395: 1844: 1475: 1395: 1327: 1204: 311: 17469:

Megaherbivores: The influence of very large body size on ecology. Cambridge studies in ecology

16154:"Pre–Younger Dryas megafaunal extirpation at Rancho La Brea linked to fire-driven state shift" 14323: 14175:"Climate-human interaction associated with southeast Australian megafauna extinction patterns" 11110: 8825:

Prey populations are no longer well controlled by predation. Killing of nonhuman predators by

2135: 20723: 20678: 20557: 20446: 20436: 18973:

Smith FA, Elliott Smith EA, Villaseñor A, Tomé CP, Lyons SK, Newsome SD (27 September 2022).

18236: 18118: 16885: 16806: 16737: 12661:"Campo Laborde: A Late Pleistocene giant ground sloth kill and butchering site in the Pampas" 12595: 12584: 12582: 12580: 10248: 9992: 9931: 9860: 9472: 9358: 9233: 8943: 8683: 8604: 8289: 7971: 7753: 6127: 5162: 5148: 4638: 4504: 4489: 4124: 2993: 1486: 299: 287: 14105:"Extinction of eastern Sahul megafauna coincides with sustained environmental deterioration" 9244:

The extinction of the megafauna has been argued by some authors to be disappearance of the

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Pinter N, Scott AC, Daulton TL, Podoll A, Koeberl C, Anderson RS, Ishman SE (1 June 2011).

18058: 17989: 17947: 17799: 17575: 17524: 17385: 17358: 17237: 17165: 17089: 17029: 16961: 16894: 16815: 16746: 16677: 16608: 16567: 16229: 16107: 15917: 15866: 15765: 15709: 15637: 15575: 15485: 15439: 15388: 15313: 15237: 15196: 15146: 15091: 14943: 14887: 14823: 14668: 14253: 14186: 14116: 14017: 13966: 13673: 13614: 13264: 13217: 13170: 12936: 12737: 12672: 12604: 12550: 12491: 12134: 12056: 11996: 11907: 11779: 11628: 11589: 11460: 11313: 11261: 11210: 11027: 10992: 10890: 10789: 10718: 10610: 10572: 10499: 10460: 10417: 10353: 10257: 10213: 10174: 10004: 9940: 9896: 9845:

Koch PL, Barnosky AD (1 January 2006). "Late Quaternary Extinctions: State of the Debate".

9808: 9755: 9687: 9435: 9403: 9309: 9130: 8897: 7841: 7729: 6443: 6186: 6020: 6006: 5231: 5101: 5058: 5036: 4914: 4101: 3771: 2942: 2859: 2824: 2387: 2029: 2015: 1757: 1576: 1331:? (other authors suggest that this taxon went extinct at the end of the Middle Pleistocene) 1129: 1020: 1003: 18550:"The legacy of the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions on nutrient availability in Amazonia" 15362: 12577: 11111:"Habitat conditions for Camelus knoblochi and factors in its extinction by Vadim V. Titov" 8782: 8: 20892: 20655: 20537: 20532: 20522: 20441: 20384: 20345: 19499: 18748:"Could methane produced by sauropod dinosaurs have helped drive Mesozoic climate warmth?" 17492:

Presenter: Willis, Paul; Producer: Bryce, Clay; Producer: Searle, Mike (17 August 2006).

17154:"Radiocarbon dating evidence for mammoths on Wrangel Island, Arctic Ocean, until 2000 BC" 16040:

The Second-Order Predation Hypothesis of Pleistocene Extinctions: A System Dynamics Model

16015:

Settlement of the American Continents: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Human Biogeography

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Surovell TA, Brigid S Grund (2012). "The associational critique of Quaternary overkill".

15834: 15815: 12773:"The Broken Zig-Zag: Late Cenozoic large mammal and tortoise extinction in South America" 9441: 9380: 9329: 9312:

in digestion, and release it through belching or flatulence. Today, around 20% of annual

9061: 8790: 8617: 8346: 7979: 7865: 7189: 6401: 5992: 5978: 5602: 5124: 4511: 3959: 3755: 2046: 1970:. The coat colours and dimensions are based on genetic evidence and historic descriptions 1150: 1045: 593: 334: 258: 31: 19507: 19371: 19336: 19268: 19184: 19144: 19107: 19043: 18992: 18928: 18879: 18842: 18765: 18658: 18609: 18567: 18471: 18426: 18398:. US/IBP Synthesis. Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden Hutchinson & Ross. pp. 186–219. 12. 18338:

Long-term changes of the geomagnetic field: recent progress, challenges and applications

18298: 18249: 18208: 18131: 18062: 17993: 17951: 17803: 17579: 17528: 17389: 17362: 17241: 17169: 17093: 17033: 16965: 16898: 16819: 16750: 16681: 16612: 16571: 16233: 16111: 15921: 15870: 15769: 15713: 15641: 15579: 15443: 15392: 15317: 15241: 15150: 15095: 14947: 14891: 14827: 14257: 14190: 14120: 14021: 13970: 13933: 13900: 13677: 13618: 13268: 13221: 13174: 13161:

Kurtén B, Werdelin L (1990). "Relationships between North and South American Smilodon".

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from the Bighill Creek Formation, Gallelli Gravel Pit, Alberta, Canada, and the fate of

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Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic Mammals of North America: Biostratigraphy and Geochronology

12138: 12060: 12000: 11911: 11783: 11632: 11593: 11464: 11317: 11265: 11214: 11150:

The Cave of Fontéchevade: Recent Excavations and Their Paleoanthropological Implications

11031: 10996: 10894: 10793: 10722: 10614: 10576: 10503: 10464: 10421: 10357: 10288: 10261: 10243: 10217: 10178: 10073: 10008: 9944: 9900: 9812: 9793: 9759: 9691: 9557: 9519: 20948: 19643: 19233: 19198: 19081: 19048: 19019: 18974: 18891: 18718: 18691: 18623: 18490: 18453: 18089: 18044: 18020: 17975: 17908: 17883: 17864: 17825: 17644: 17599: 17548: 17409: 17195: 17125: 17105: 16992: 16947: 16923: 16880: 16856: 16801: 16777: 16732: 16708: 16663: 16639: 16594: 16403: 16253: 16191: 16133: 15995: 15960: 15789: 15661: 15342: 15301: 15169: 15134: 15115: 14974: 14929: 14839: 14599: 14566: 14541:

Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and New Guinea: One Hundred Million Years of Evolution

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Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and New Guinea: One Hundred Million Years of Evolution

14217: 14174: 14147: 14104: 13990: 13813: 13740: 13697: 13689: 13637: 13602: 13186: 12967: 12924: 12753: 12701: 12660: 12633: 12590: 12566: 12515: 12158: 12080: 12012: 11930: 11895: 11822: 11747: 11722: 11662: 11654: 11556: 11521: 11502: 11432: 11367: 11285: 11234: 10964: 10734: 10634: 10541: 10433: 10225: 10085: 10038: 9963: 9926: 9864: 9824: 9771: 9718: 9673: 9642: 9607: 9531: 9362: 9081: 8947: 8937:, because ruminants are able to extract more nutrition from limited quantities of high- 8253: 8157: 7983: 7975: 7859: 7153: 7032: 6775: 5893: 5685: 5556: 5531: 5238: 4587: 4138: 3945: 3917: 3891: 3729: 3222: 2309: 2267: 2116: 1940: 1825: 1776: 1447: 1433: 1297: 1069: 998:

Human hunting causing attrition of megafauna populations, commonly known as "overkill".

822: 523: 464: 263: 18910: 16552: 16153: 15902:

Fiedel, S., Haynes, G. (2004). "A premature burial: comments on Grayson and Meltzer's

15888: 15623:"A multispecies overkill simulation of the end-Pleistocene megafaunal mass extinction" 14731:

Martin, P. S. (1967). "Prehistoric overkill". In Martin, P. S., Wright, H. E. (eds.).

14626:. Developments in Hydrobiology. Vol. 87. Springer Netherlands. pp. 225–231. 14405:"Buried tools and pigments tell a new history of humans in Australia for 65,000 years" 8959:

previously isolated, localized ecosystems were detrimental to select groups of fauna.

8689: 8475:(a two-to-three meter long mekosuchine crocodylian, apex predator of Pleistocene Fiji) 7948:(life reconstruction) was one of four species of flamingo present in Australia in the 452: 20862: 20748: 20738: 20491: 20451: 20143: 20107: 19684: 19638: 19303: 19280: 19237: 19149: 19131: 19073: 19065: 19024: 19006: 18948: 18940: 18915: 18895: 18866: 18779: 18723: 18672: 18554: 18495: 18393: 18374: 18318: 18310: 18263: 18143: 18094: 18076: 18025: 18007: 17959: 17913: 17868: 17817: 17812: 17728: 17700: 17692: 17671: 17663: 17634: 17591: 17540: 17472: 17432: 17401: 17329: 17304: 17279: 17253: 17208: 17132: 17109: 17101: 17060: 16997: 16979: 16928: 16910: 16861: 16843: 16838: 16782: 16764: 16713: 16695: 16644: 16626: 16531: 16506: 16462: 16437: 16412: 16366: 16341: 16301: 16276: 16245: 16195: 16183: 16175: 16158: 16137: 16125: 16047: 16018: 15964: 15839: 15793: 15781: 15725: 15653: 15598: 15546: 15521: 15498: 15488: 15457: 15430: 15406: 15347: 15329: 15174: 15107: 15054: 15010: 14999: 14979: 14961: 14903: 14761: 14736: 14711: 14688: 14635: 14604: 14586: 14545: 14518: 14436: 14383: 14356: 14329: 14299: 14271: 14222: 14204: 14152: 14134: 14033: 13994: 13982: 13938: 13920: 13881: 13817: 13805: 13744: 13732: 13661: 13642: 13578: 13551: 13469: 13462: 13396: 13369: 13342: 13315: 13290: 13143: 13050: 13030: 12972: 12954: 12900: 12757: 12706: 12688: 12638: 12620: 12570: 12507: 12423: 12398: 12373: 12346: 12319: 12236: 12209: 12162: 12150: 12072: 11984: 11935: 11876: 11866: 11752: 11688: 11616: 11561: 11543: 11506: 11494: 11486: 11436: 11289: 11277: 11238: 11226: 11181: 11154: 11090: 11060: 10930: 10863: 10853: 10759: 10689: 10638: 10626: 10545: 10533: 10525: 10437: 10324: 10293: 10275: 10129: 10089: 10077: 10030: 9995: 9968: 9925:

Frédérik Saltré, Marta Rodríguez-Rey, Barry W. Brook, Christopher N. Johnson (2016).

9828: 9775: 9723: 9705: 9647: 9629: 9573: 9535: 9523: 9391:

There is no general agreement on where the Quaternary extinction event ends, and the

9313: 9064:, mixed feeders and non-ruminant grazer species suffered most, while relatively more 9049: 9024: 8679: 8209: 8195: 8088: 7476: 7224: 7077: 6967: 6780: 6218: 5941: 5514: 5073: 4856: 4796: 4720: 4435:

extirpated from North America, South American populations recolonised former range) (

4401: 4318: 3624: 3609: 3577: 2679: 2537: 2503: 2435: 2247: 2200: 2128: 1992: 1852: 1634: 1608: 1512: 1458: 1216: 1174: 1163: 1105: 1024: 744: 534: 243: 228: 19572: 19379: 19344: 19202: 18850: 18627: 18434: 18216: 18139: 17648: 17603: 16948:"Overkill, glacial history, and the extinction of North America's Ice Age megafauna" 16096:"Exploring a natural baseline for large-herbivore biomass in ecological restoration" 15999: 15665: 15119: 14843: 13978: 13844: 13701: 13446: 12749: 12533:

Wilson, M.C., L.V. Hills, B. Shapiro (2008). "Late Pleistocene northward-dispersing

12519: 12084: 12016: 11666: 11371: 10738: 10585: 10560: 10487: 10472: 10429: 10365: 10186: 10042: 9927:"Climate change not to blame for late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in Australia" 9868: 9767: 3417: 208: 20867: 20615: 20590: 20547: 20517: 20466: 20461: 20237: 20112: 20081: 19878: 19648: 19375: 19340: 19272: 19225: 19188: 19139: 19121: 19085: 19057: 19014: 18996: 18932: 18883: 18846: 18769: 18713: 18705: 18692:"Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change" 18662: 18613: 18571: 18485: 18475: 18430: 18341: 18302: 18253: 18212: 18135: 18084: 18066: 18015: 17997: 17955: 17903: 17895: 17856: 17829: 17807: 17626: 17583: 17552: 17532: 17413: 17393: 17299:

Birks, H.J.B., West, R.G. (1973). "A Symposium of the British Ecological Society".

17245: 17173: 17097: 17037: 16987: 16969: 16918: 16902: 16851: 16833: 16823: 16772: 16754: 16703: 16685: 16662:

Mann DH, Groves P, Reanier RE, Gaglioti BV, Kunz ML, Shapiro B (17 November 2015).

16634: 16616: 16575: 16257: 16237: 16167: 16115: 15987: 15952: 15925: 15884: 15829: 15773: 15717: 15704:. Scoping the Future of Archaeological Science: Papers in Honour of Richard Klein. 15645: 15447: 15396: 15337: 15321: 15255: 15245: 15164: 15154: 15099: 15046: 14969: 14951: 14930:"Test of Martin's overkill hypothesis using radiocarbon dates on extinct megafauna" 14895: 14831: 14680: 14627: 14594: 14578: 14261: 14212: 14194: 14142: 14124: 14025: 13974: 13928: 13912: 13871: 13840: 13797: 13724: 13681: 13632: 13622: 13442: 13280: 13272: 13235: 13225: 13182: 13178: 13133: 13123: 13003: 12962: 12944: 12787: 12745: 12696: 12680: 12628: 12612: 12558: 12499: 12142: 12064: 12004: 11925: 11915: 11814: 11787: 11742: 11734: 11644: 11636: 11597: 11551: 11533: 11476: 11468: 11424: 11357: 11349: 11321: 11269: 11218: 11035: 11000: 10898: 10828: 10797: 10726: 10618: 10580: 10515: 10507: 10468: 10425: 10361: 10316: 10283: 10265: 10221: 10182: 10119: 10069: 10022: 9958: 9948: 9904: 9856: 9816: 9763: 9713: 9695: 9637: 9621: 9608:"Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change" 9565: 9515: 9415: 9033: 8989: 8735: 8389: 8364: 7964: 7956: 7915: 7543: 7360: 6934: 6926: 6919: 6499: 6260: 6207: 6194: 5913: 5428: 5087: 4810: 4545: 4414: 4389: 4382: 4304: 4290: 4152: 4065: 3759: 3745: 3737: 3585: 3545: 3464: 2373: 2152: 1139: 608: 275: 248: 239: 224: 18454:"Lateral Diffusion of Nutrients by Mammalian Herbivores in Terrestrial Ecosystems" 18346: 17933:"Was a 'hyperdisease' responsible for the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction?" 13128: 13111: 12068: 11617:"The First Occurrence of a Toxodont (Mammalia, Notoungulata) in the United States" 10801: 6652: 3620: 3605: 20575: 20512: 20337: 20333: 20329: 20206: 20102: 20040: 19935: 19904: 19873: 18752: 18667: 18642: 18545: 18480: 18449: 18306: 17249: 17041: 16579: 15401: 15376: 14899: 14684: 14631: 14456: 14029: 13627: 13276: 12949: 12230: 11640: 11601: 11325: 11273: 11222: 11084: 11039: 10924: 10730: 10622: 10401:

Turvey ST, Sathe V, Crees JJ, Jukar AM, Chakraborty P, Lister AM (January 2021).

9908: 9569: 9367: 9349:. The decrease in atmospheric methane that occurred at that time, as recorded in 9154: 8396: 8282: 8105: 8003: 7944: 7911: 7907: 7711:(small terror bird remains dated to the Late Pleistocene, but these are disputed) 7691: 7298: 6906: 6171: 5927: 5824: 5701: 5671: 5301: 4826: 4601: 4261: 4241: 3862: 3515: 3448: 3374: 3051: 2693: 2651: 1926: 1917: 1860: 1639: 1527: 1469: 1157: 1082: 807: 20362: 17860: 17630: 16321:

Davis, M. B. (1976). "Pleistocene biogeography of temperate deciduous forests".

13728: 12008: 11177:

The Black Sea Flood Question: Changes in Coastline, Climate and Human Settlement

8706: 8519:) (a giant predatory monitor lizard comparable or larger than the Komodo dragon) 7807: 6574: 3683: 20728: 20703: 20356: 20175: 20045: 19940: 19909: 18980: