Long-term archives reveal shifting extinction selectivity in China's postglacial mammal fauna.

ABSTRACT: Ecosystems have been modified by human activities for millennia, and insights about ecology and extinction risk based only on recent data are likely to be both incomplete and biased. We synthesize multiple long-term archives (over 250 archaeological and palaeontological sites dating from the early Holocene to the Ming Dynasty and over 4400 historical records) to reconstruct the spatio-temporal dynamics of Holocene-modern range change across China, a megadiverse country experiencing extensive current-day biodiversity loss, for 34 mammal species over three successive postglacial time intervals. Our combined zooarchaeological, palaeontological, historical and current-day datasets reveal that both phylogenetic and spatial patterns of extinction selectivity have varied through time in China, pr

SUBMITTER: Turvey ST 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5719176 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature