ArticleNature communications2018
Population reconstructions for humans and megafauna suggest mixed causes for North American Pleistocene extinctions.
Article in Nature communications, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Nutritional adaptations to early maize cultivation: Earliest isotopic evidence of maize-based animal provisioning in the Neotropics.Science advances · 2026Article
- Hemisphere-wide evidence of Early Paleoindian megaherbivore specialization.Science advances · 2026Article
- A refined chronology of the Naumann's elephant (Palaeoloxodon naumanni) provides a new insight on factors of their extinction.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Rewilding: history, intervention and the quest for immanence.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2026Article
- Why it is easier to date Quaternary extinctions than human colonizations under conditions of overkill.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Article
- Extinct megafauna dominated human subsistence in southern South America before 11,600 years ago.Science advances · 2025Article
- Global spatiotemporal patterns of demographic fluctuations in terrestrial vertebrates during the Late Pleistocene.Science advances · 2025Article
- Small populations of Palaeolithic humans in Cyprus hunted endemic megafauna to extinction.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Climate-driven habitat shifts of high-ranked prey species structure Late Upper Paleolithic hunting.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Changes in projectile design and size of prey reveal the central role of Fishtail points in megafauna hunting in South America.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Reply to: Accurate population proxies do not exist between 11.7 and 15 ka in North America.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Accurate population proxies do not exist between 11.7 and 15 ka in North America.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The impact of genetic modifiers on variation in germline mutation rates within and among human populations.Genetics · 2022Article
- Male mastodon landscape use changed with maturation (late Pleistocene, North America).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Climate change-induced population pressure drives high rates of lethal violence in the Prehispanic central Andes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Population dynamics in the Japanese Archipelago since the Pleistocene revealed by the complete mitochondrial genome sequences.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Climate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Article
- Inferring evolutionary dynamics of mutation rates through the lens of mutation spectrum variation.Current opinion in genetics & development · 2020Review
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Dozens of large mammals such as mammoth and mastodon disappeared in North America at the end of the Pleistocene with climate change and "overkill" by human hunters the most widely-argued causes. However, the population dynamics of humans and megafauna preceding extinctions have received little attention even though such information may be telling as we expect increasing human populations to be correlated with megafaunal declines if hunting caused extinctions. No such trends are expected if climate change was the primary cause. We present tests of these hypotheses here by using summed calibrated radiocarbon date distributions to reconstruct population levels of megafauna and humans. The results suggest that the causes for extinctions varied across taxa and by region. In three cases, extinctions appear linked to hunting, while in five others they are consistent with the ecological effects of climate change and in a final case, both hunting and climate change appear responsible.
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