ArticleNature communications2021
Climate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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18 citing papers in PubMed, 96 citations in OpenAlex.
- A dataset of radiocarbon dates from Holarctic mammal collagen purified with high-quality chemistry.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Destructive by nature? What human-driven extinctions of mammoths and mastodons mean for today's planetary environmental crisis.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Review
- Extinct megafauna dominated human subsistence in southern South America before 11,600 years ago.Science advances · 2025Article
- Summer warmth between 15,500 and 15,000 years ago enabled human repopulation of the northwest European margin.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- A reference genome for the Harpy Eagle reveals steady demographic decline and chromosomal rearrangements in the origin of Accipitriformes.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Genomic Analyses Capture the Human-Induced Demographic Collapse and Recovery in a Wide-Ranging Cervid.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Review
- Introduction and behavioral validation of the climate change distress and impairment scale.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Accurate population proxies do not exist between 11.7 and 15 ka in North America.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Reply to: Accurate population proxies do not exist between 11.7 and 15 ka in North America.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Ancient mitochondrial and modern whole genomes unravel massive genetic diversity loss during near extinction of Alpine ibex.Molecular ecology · 2022Article
- Late Holocene anthropogenic landscape change in northwestern Europe impacted insect biodiversity as much as climate change did after the last Ice Age.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 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
- Genetics Matters: Voyaging from the Past into the Future of Humanity and Sustainability.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Review
- Small brains predisposed Late Quaternary mammals to extinction.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Clinal variation as a tool to understand climate change.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Review
- Bayesian analyses question the role of climate in Chulmun demography.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).Nature communications · 2021Article
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3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The disappearance of many North American megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene is a contentious topic. While the proposed causes for megafaunal extinction are varied, most researchers fall into three broad camps emphasizing human overhunting, climate change, or some combination of the two. Understanding the cause of megafaunal extinctions requires the analysis of through-time relationships between climate change and megafauna and human population dynamics. To do so, many researchers have used summed probability density functions (SPDFs) as a proxy for through-time fluctuations in human and megafauna population sizes. SPDFs, however, conflate process variation with the chronological uncertainty inherent in radiocarbon dates. Recently, a new Bayesian regression technique was developed that overcomes this problem-Radiocarbon-dated Event-Count (REC) Modelling. Here we employ REC models to test whether declines in North American megafauna species could be best explained by climate changes, increases in human population densities, or both, using the largest available database of megafauna and human radiocarbon dates. Our results suggest that there is currently no evidence for a persistent through-time relationship between human and megafauna population levels in North America. There is, however, evidence that decreases in global temperature correlated with megafauna population declines.
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