ArticleScience advances2020
A multimillennial climatic context for the megafaunal extinctions in Madagascar and Mascarene Islands.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- Tipping points induced by palaeo-human impacts can explain presence of savannah in Malagasy and global systems where forest is expected.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Pooled it
- North Atlantic Subtropical High forcing of Atlantic Warm Pool hydroclimate variability on millennial to orbital timescales.Science advances · 2025Article
- Montane rainforest dynamics under changes in climate and human impact during the past millennia in northern Madagascar.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Ecological dynamics of moa extinctions reveal convergent refugia that today harbour flightless birds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Zonal control on Holocene precipitation in northwestern Madagascar based on a stalagmite from Anjohibe.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Past volcanic activity predisposes an endemic threatened seabird to negative anthropogenic impacts.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Cutmarked bone of drought-tolerant extinct megafauna deposited with traces of fire, human foraging, and introduced animals in SW Madagascar.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Global importance of Indigenous Peoples, their lands, and knowledge systems for saving the world's primates from extinction.Science advances · 2022Review
- Collapse of the Liangzhu and other Neolithic cultures in the lower Yangtze region in response to climate change.Science advances · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
17 authors at 8 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues underwent catastrophic ecological and landscape transformations, which virtually eliminated their entire endemic vertebrate megafauna during the past millennium. These ecosystem changes have been alternately attributed to either human activities, climate change, or both, but parsing their relative importance, particularly in the case of Madagascar, has proven difficult. Here, we present a multimillennial (approximately the past 8000 years) reconstruction of the southwest Indian Ocean hydroclimate variability using speleothems from the island of Rodrigues, located ∼1600 km east of Madagascar. The record shows a recurring pattern of hydroclimate variability characterized by submillennial-scale drying trends, which were punctuated by decadal-to-multidecadal megadroughts, including during the late Holocene. Our data imply that the megafauna of the Mascarenes and Madagascar were resilient, enduring repeated past episodes of severe climate stress, but collapsed when a major increase in human activity occurred in the context of a prominent drying trend.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.