TY - JOUR
T1 - Humans rather than climate the primary cause of Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in Australia
AU - van der Kaars, Alexander
AU - Miller, Gifford H.
AU - Turney, Chris S M
AU - Cook, Ellyn J
AU - Nürnberg, Dirk
AU - Schönfeld, Joachim
AU - Kershaw, A Peter
AU - Lehman, Scott J.
PY - 2017/1/20
Y1 - 2017/1/20
N2 - Environmental histories that span the last full glacial cycle and are representative of regional change in Australia are scarce, hampering assessment of environmental change preceding and concurrent with human dispersal on the continent ca. 47,000 years ago. Here we present a continuous 150,000-year record offshore south-Western Australia and identify the timing of two critical late Pleistocene events: wide-scale ecosystem change and regional megafaunal population collapse. We establish that substantial changes in vegetation and fire regime occurred ∼70,000 years ago under a climate much drier than today. We record high levels of the dung fungus Sporormiella, a proxy for herbivore biomass, from 150,000 to 45,000 years ago, then a marked decline indicating megafaunal population collapse, from 45,000 to 43,100 years ago, placing the extinctions within 4,000 years of human dispersal across Australia. These findings rule out climate change, and implicate humans, as the primary extinction cause.
AB - Environmental histories that span the last full glacial cycle and are representative of regional change in Australia are scarce, hampering assessment of environmental change preceding and concurrent with human dispersal on the continent ca. 47,000 years ago. Here we present a continuous 150,000-year record offshore south-Western Australia and identify the timing of two critical late Pleistocene events: wide-scale ecosystem change and regional megafaunal population collapse. We establish that substantial changes in vegetation and fire regime occurred ∼70,000 years ago under a climate much drier than today. We record high levels of the dung fungus Sporormiella, a proxy for herbivore biomass, from 150,000 to 45,000 years ago, then a marked decline indicating megafaunal population collapse, from 45,000 to 43,100 years ago, placing the extinctions within 4,000 years of human dispersal across Australia. These findings rule out climate change, and implicate humans, as the primary extinction cause.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85010005240&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/ncomms14142
DO - 10.1038/ncomms14142
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85010005240
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 8
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
M1 - 14142
ER -