Climate warming and humans played different roles in triggering Late Quaternary extinctions in east and west Eurasia.

ABSTRACT: Climate change and humans are proposed as the two key drivers of total extinction of many large mammals in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, but disentangling their relative roles remains challenging owing to a lack of quantitative evaluation of human impact and climate-driven distribution changes on the extinctions of these large mammals in a continuous temporal-spatial dimension. Here, our analyses showed that temperature change had significant effects on mammoth (genus Mammuthus), rhinoceros (Rhinocerotidae), horse (Equidae) and deer (Cervidae). Rapid global warming was the predominant factor driving the total extinction of mammoths and rhinos in frigid zones from the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. Humans showed significant, negative effects on extirpations of the four mamm

SUBMITTER: Wan X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5378077 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature