Climate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America.

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

SUBMITTER: Stewart M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7886903 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature