Between fifty and ten thousand years ago, most large mammals became extinct everywhere except Africa. Slow-breeding animals also were hard hit, regardless of size. This unusual extinction of large and slow-breeding animals provides some of the strongest support for a human contribution to their extinction and is consistent with various human hunting models, but it is difficult to explain by models relying solely on environmental change. It is an oversimplification, however, to say that a wave of hunting-induced extinctions swept continents immediately after first human contact. Results from recent studies suggest that humans precipitated extinction in many parts of the globe through combined direct (hunting) and perhaps indirect (competition, habitat alteration) impacts, but that the timing and geography of extinction might have been different and the worldwide magnitude less, had not climatic change coincided with human impacts in many places.

/pdf/late-quaternary-extinctions-state-of-the-debate-1f8rigowiq.pdf

Late Quaternary Extinctions: State of the Debate

(1969). Studies of early culture in East Africa. World Archaeology: Vol. 1, Recent work and new approaches, pp. 1-28.

Studies of early culture in East Africa

Characteristics of Pleistocene megafauna extinctions in Southeast Asia

Debate over the Late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions has focussed on whether human colonisation or climatic changes were more important drivers of extinction, with few extinctions being unambiguously attributable to either. Most analyses have been geographically or taxonomically restricted and the few quantitative global analyses have been limited by coarse temporal resolution or overly simplified climate reconstructions or proxies. We present a global analysis of the causes of these extinctions which uses high-resolution climate reconstructions and explicitly investigates the sensitivity of our results to uncertainty in the palaeological record. Our results show that human colonisation was the dominant driver of megafaunal extinction across the world but that climatic factors were also important. We identify the geographic regions where future research is likely to have the most impact, with our models reliably predicting extinctions across most of the world, with the notable exception of mainland Asia where we fail to explain the apparently low rate of extinction found in in the fossil record. Our results are highly robust to uncertainties in the palaeological record, and our main conclusions are unlikely to change qualitatively following minor improvements or changes in the dates of extinctions and human colonisation.

/pdf/robustness-despite-uncertainty-regional-climate-data-reveal-1aya7ug4k3.pdf

Robustness despite uncertainty: regional climate data reveal the dominant role of humans in explaining global extinctions of Late Quaternary megafauna

Review of the protected areas system in the Afrotropical realm

DR. MARTIN'S paper1 calls for comment, both on questions of fact and of interpretation, at least in regard to what he writes about Africa.

L. S. B. Leakey

Papers

Africa and Pleistocene Overkill