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136131- Climate-human interaction associated with southeast Australian megafauna extinction patterns.pdf (1.23 MB)

Climate-human interaction associated with southeast Australian megafauna extinction patterns

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posted on 2023-05-20, 08:41 authored by Saltre, F, Chadoeuf, J, Peters, KJ, Matthew McDowellMatthew McDowell, Friedrich, T, Timmermann, A, Ulm, S, Bradshaw, CJA
The mechanisms leading to megafauna (>44 kg) extinctions in Late Pleistocene (126,000— 12,000 years ago) Australia are highly contested because standard chronological analyses rely on scarce data of varying quality and ignore spatial complexity. Relevant archaeological and palaeontological records are most often also biased by differential preservation resulting in under-representated older events. Chronological analyses have attributed megafaunal extinctions to climate change, humans, or a combination of the two, but rarely consider spatial variation in extinction patterns, initial human appearance trajectories, and palaeoclimate change together. Here we develop a statistical approach to infer spatio-temporal trajectories of megafauna extirpations (local extinctions) and initial human appearance in south-eastern Australia. We identify a combined climate-human effect on regional extirpation patterns suggesting that small, mobile Aboriginal populations potentially needed access to drinkable water to survive arid ecosystems, but were simultaneously constrained by climate-dependent net landscape primary productivity. Thus, the co-drivers of megafauna extirpations were themselves constrained by the spatial distribution of climate-dependent water sources.

History

Publication title

Nature Communications

Volume

10

Article number

5311

Number

5311

Pagination

1-9

ISSN

2041-1723

Department/School

School of Natural Sciences

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Place of publication

United Kingdom

Rights statement

© The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Terrestrial biodiversity

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