Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Late Quaternary megafauna extinctions impoverished mammalian diversity worldwide. The causes of these extinctions in Australia are most controversial but essential to resolve, because this continent-wide event presaged similar losses that occurred thousands of years later on other continents. Here we apply a rigorous metadata analysis and new ensemble-hindcasting approach to 659 Australian megafauna fossil ages. When coupled with analysis of several high-resolution climate records, we show that megafaunal extinctions were broadly synchronous among genera and independent of climate aridity and variability in Australia over the last 120,000 years. Our results reject climate change as the primary driver of megafauna extinctions in the world's most controversial context, and instead estimate that the megafauna disappeared Australia-wide ∼13,500 years after human arrival, with shorter periods of coexistence in some regions. This is the first comprehensive approach to incorporate uncertainty in fossil ages, extinction timing and climatology, to quantify mechanisms of prehistorical extinctions.
Source: Nature Communications
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10511
Authors: Frédérik Saltré, Marta Rodríguez-Rey, Barry W. Brook, Christopher N Johnson, Chris S. M. Turney, John Alroy, Alan Cooper, Nicholas Beeton, Michael I. Bird, Damien A. Fordham, Richard Gillespie, Salvador Herrando-Pérez, Zenobia Jacobs, Gifford H. Miller, David Nogués-Bravo, Gavin J. Prideaux, Richard G. Roberts, Corey J. A. Bradshaw
Institutions: The University of Adelaide, University of Tasmania, UNSW Sydney, Macquarie University, James Cook University, Australian National University, University of Wollongong, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado Boulder, Curtin University, University of Copenhagen, Natural History Museum of Denmark, Flinders University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDGs: Climate action, Life on land
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $6,990
Awards: Resolving how five million years of dramatic climatic changes shaped Australia's unique fauna, Solving the problems of estimating extinction rates in recent and geological time, What is natural? Humans, megafauna and climate in northern Australia, Systems modelling for synergistic ecological-climate dynamics, Out of Asia: unique insights into human evolution and interactions using frontier technologies in archaeological science, Tipping points in Records of Extreme Events in Australasia: Using the Past to Understand and Plan for Abrupt Future Climate Change, Generalised methods for testing extinction dynamics across geological, near and modern time scales, Using ancient microbiomes and genomes to reconstruct human history
OpenAlex ID: W2338258686