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Ecosystem Collapse in Pleistocene Australia and a Human Role in Megafaunal Extinction
Abstract
Most of Australia's largest mammals became extinct 50,000 to 45,000 years ago, shortly after humans colonized the continent. Without exceptional climate change at that time, a human cause is inferred, but a mechanism remains elusive. A 140,000-year record of dietary δ 13 C documents a permanent reduction in food sources available to the Australian emu, beginning about the time of human colonization; a change replicated at three widely separated sites and in the marsupial wombat. We speculate that human firing of landscapes rapidly converted a drought-adapted mosaic of trees, shrubs, and nutritious grasslands to the modern fire-adapted desert scrub. Animals that could adapt survived; those that could not, became extinct.
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Cited by
Bowman, D. M. J. S., Balch, J. K., Artaxo, P., Bond, W. J., Carlson, J. M., Cochrane, M. A., D’Antonio, C. M., DeFries, R. S., Doyle, J. C., Harrison, S. P., et al. (2009) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1163886 · Cited by 3,351
The human dimension of fire regimes on Earth
Bowman, D. M. J. S., Balch, J., Artaxo, P., Bond, W. J., Cochrane, M. A., D’Antonio, C. M., DeFries, R., Johnston, F. H., Keeley, J. E., Krawchuk, M. A., et al. (2011) · Journal of Biogeography · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2011.02595.x · Cited by 1,230
Late Quaternary Extinctions: State of the Debate
Koch, P. L., & Barnosky, A. D. (2006) · Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics · doi:10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.34.011802.132415 · Cited by 885
Boivin, N. L., Zeder, M. A., Fuller, D. Q., Crowther, A., Larson, G., Erlandson, J. M., Denham, T., & Petraglia, M. D. (2016) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1525200113 · Cited by 837
Global terrestrial Human Footprint maps for 1993 and 2009
Venter, O., Sanderson, E. W., Magrach, A., Allan, J. R., Beher, J., Jones, K. R., Possingham, H. P., Laurance, W. F., Wood, P., Fekete, B. M., et al. (2016) · Scientific Data · doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.67 · Cited by 837
Metadata
- Authors
- Miller, G. H., Fogel, M. L., Magee, J. W., Gagan, M. K., Clarke, S. J., & Johnson, B. J.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2005-07-08
- Volume
- 309
- Issue
- 5732
- Pages
- 287-290
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2127781424
- Cited by
- 447
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 195.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Miller, G. H., Fogel, M. L., Magee, J. W., Gagan, M. K., Clarke, S. J., & Johnson, B. J. (2005). Ecosystem Collapse in Pleistocene Australia and a Human Role in Megafaunal Extinction. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1111288
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
