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      Pleistocene Overkill and North American Mammalian Extinctions

      Annual Review of Anthropology
      Annual Reviews

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          Abstract

          Clovis groups in Late Pleistocene North America occasionally hunted several now extinct large mammals. But whether their hunting drove 37 genera of animals to extinction has been disputed, largely for want of kill sites. Overkill proponents argue that there is more archaeological evidence than we ought to expect, that humans had the wherewithal to decimate what may have been millions of animals, and that the appearance of humans and the disappearance of the fauna is too striking to be a mere coincidence. Yet, there is less to these claims than meets the eye. Moreover, extinctions took place amid sweeping climatic and environmental changes as the Pleistocene came to an end. It has long been difficult to link those changes to mammalian extinctions, but the advent of ancient DNA, coupled with high-resolution paleoecological, radiocarbon, and archeological records, should help disentangle the relative role of changing climates and people in mammalian extinctions.

          Most cited references110

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          Synergies among extinction drivers under global change.

          If habitat destruction or overexploitation of populations is severe, species loss can occur directly and abruptly. Yet the final descent to extinction is often driven by synergistic processes (amplifying feedbacks) that can be disconnected from the original cause of decline. We review recent observational, experimental and meta-analytic work which together show that owing to interacting and self-reinforcing processes, estimates of extinction risk for most species are more severe than previously recognised. As such, conservation actions which only target single-threat drivers risk being inadequate because of the cascading effects caused by unmanaged synergies. Future work should focus on how climate change will interact with and accelerate ongoing threats to biodiversity, such as habitat degradation, overexploitation and invasive species.
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            Vertebrate Taphonomy

            R. Lyman (1994)
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              Assessing the causes of late Pleistocene extinctions on the continents.

              One of the great debates about extinction is whether humans or climatic change caused the demise of the Pleistocene megafauna. Evidence from paleontology, climatology, archaeology, and ecology now supports the idea that humans contributed to extinction on some continents, but human hunting was not solely responsible for the pattern of extinction everywhere. Instead, evidence suggests that the intersection of human impacts with pronounced climatic change drove the precise timing and geography of extinction in the Northern Hemisphere. The story from the Southern Hemisphere is still unfolding. New evidence from Australia supports the view that humans helped cause extinctions there, but the correlation with climate is weak or contested. Firmer chronologies, more realistic ecological models, and regional paleoecological insights still are needed to understand details of the worldwide extinction pattern and the population dynamics of the species involved.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Annual Review of Anthropology
                Annu. Rev. Anthropol.
                Annual Reviews
                0084-6570
                1545-4290
                October 21 2015
                October 21 2015
                : 44
                : 1
                : 33-53
                Article
                10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-013854
                be31c6ad-7f23-4cd8-b112-05f46a04d0cd
                © 2015
                History

                Evolutionary Biology
                Evolutionary Biology

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