Humans rather than climate the primary cause of Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in Australia

Sander van der Kaars (), Gifford H. Miller (), Chris S. M. Turney, Ellyn J. Cook, Dirk Nürnberg, Joachim Schönfeld, A. Peter Kershaw and Scott J. Lehman
Additional contact information
Sander van der Kaars: School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University
Gifford H. Miller: INSTAAR and Geological Sciences, University of Colorado
Chris S. M. Turney: Climate Change Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales
Ellyn J. Cook: School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University
Dirk Nürnberg: GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel
Joachim Schönfeld: GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel
A. Peter Kershaw: School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University
Scott J. Lehman: INSTAAR and Geological Sciences, University of Colorado

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract 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.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14142 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms14142

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14142

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().