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Climate change not to blame for late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in Australia

Saltré, Frédérik, Rodríguez-Rey, Marta, Brook, Barry W., Johnson, Christopher N, Turney, Chris S. M., Alroy, John, Cooper, Alan, Beeton, Nicholas, Bird, Michael I., Fordham, Damien A., Gillespie, Richard, Herrando-Pérez, Salvador, Jacobs, Zenobia, Miller, Gifford H., Nogués-Bravo, David, Prideaux, Gavin J., Roberts, Richard G., Bradshaw, Corey J. A.·2016·Nature Communications
DOI 10.1038/ncomms10511PMC PMC4740174
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Abstract

Late Quaternary megafauna extinctions impoverished mammalian diversity worldwide. The causes of these extinctions in Australia are most controversial but essential to resolve, because this continent-wide event presaged similar losses that occurred thousands of years later on other continents. Here we apply a rigorous metadata analysis and new ensemble-hindcasting approach to 659 Australian megafauna fossil ages. When coupled with analysis of several high-resolution climate records, we show that megafaunal extinctions were broadly synchronous among genera and independent of climate aridity and variability in Australia over the last 120,000 years. Our results reject climate change as the primary driver of megafauna extinctions in the world’s most controversial context, and instead estimate that the megafauna disappeared Australia-wide ∼13,500 years after human arrival, with shorter periods of coexistence in some regions. This is the first comprehensive approach to incorporate uncertainty in fossil ages, extinction timing and climatology, to quantify mechanisms of prehistorical extinctions.

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  • During the millennia following human arrival, the hydroclimate at the continental scale cycled several times through conditions similar to modern conditions, toward both wetter and drier periods, potentially with different timing and to differing degrees from the south to the north of the continent.

    “However, during the millennia following human arrival, the hydroclimate at the continental scale cycled several times through conditions similar to modern conditions, toward both wetter and drier periods, potentially with different timing and to differing degrees from the south to the north of the continent (48–51).”

    From Humans, water, and the colonization of Australia (2016) · cites this paper as [51]

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Research works printed but not linked: 45

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Metadata

Authors
Saltré, F., Rodríguez-Rey, M., Brook, B. W., Johnson, C. N., Turney, C. S. M., Alroy, J., Cooper, A., Beeton, N., Bird, M. I., Fordham, D. A., Gillespie, R., Herrando-Pérez, S., Jacobs, Z., Miller, G. H., Nogués-Bravo, D., Prideaux, G. J., Roberts, R. G., & Bradshaw, C. J. A.
ORCID
Venue
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2016-01-29
Volume
7
Issue
1
ISSN
2041-1723
DOI
10.1038/ncomms10511
PMC
PMC4740174
Cited by
136
References
1
Language
en
Licence

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