Ancient DNA analyses exclude humans as the driving force behind late Pleistocene musk ox (
            <i>Ovibos moschatus</i>
            ) population dynamics

Campos, Paula F.; Willerslev, Eske; Sher, Andrei; Orlando, Ludovic; Axelsson, Erik; Tikhonov, Alexei; Aaris-Sørensen, Kim; Greenwood, Alex D.; Kahlke, Ralf‐Dietrich; Косинцев, П. А.; Krakhmalnaya, Tatiana; Кузнецова, Т. В.; Lemey, Philippe; MacPhee, R. D. E.; Norris, Christopher A.; Shepherd, Kieran M.; Suchard, Marc A.; Zazula, Grant D.; Shapiro, Beth; Gilbert, M. Thomas P.

doi:10.1073/pnas.0907189107

Cited by 208 publications

(169 citation statements)

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“…(57) and muskoxen after 48 calendar ka B.P. (3,58). Although the precise timing of these population bottlenecks remain obscure (13), their occurrence during the mid-Wisconsin interstadials is consistent with the hypothesis by Guthrie (37).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Life and extinction of megafauna in the ice-age Arctic

Mann

Groves

Reanier³

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Understanding the population dynamics of megafauna that inhabited the mammoth steppe provides insights into the causes of extinctions during both the terminal Pleistocene and today. Our study area is Alaska's North Slope, a place where humans were rare when these extinctions occurred. After developing a statistical approach to remove the age artifacts caused by radiocarbon calibration from a large series of dated megafaunal bones, we compare the temporal patterns of bone abundance with climate records. Megafaunal abundance tracked ice age climate, peaking during transitions from cold to warm periods. These results suggest that a defining characteristic of the mammoth steppe was its temporal instability and imply that regional extinctions followed by population reestablishment from distant refugia were characteristic features of ice-age biogeography at high latitudes. It follows that long-distance dispersal was crucial for the long-term persistence of megafaunal species living in the Arctic. Such dispersal was only possible when their rapidly shifting range lands were geographically interconnected. The end of the last ice age was fatally unique because the geographic ranges of arctic megafauna became permanently fragmented after stable, interglacial climate engendered the spread of peatlands at the same time that rising sea level severed former dispersal routes. (10,000-45,000 calendar y ago) when some 65% of terrestrial megafauna genera (animals weighing >45 kg) became globally extinct (1). Based on what we know about recent species extinctions, the causes of extinction are usually synergistic, often species-specific, and therefore, complex, which implies that there is no universal explanation for end-Pleistocene extinctions (2, 3). Globally and specifically in the Arctic (3-10), megafaunal extinctions have been variously blamed on overhunting, rapid climate change, habitat loss, and introduced diseases (3-10). Further complicating a clear understanding of the causes of ice-age extinctions is that the magnitude and tempo of environmental change during the last 100,000 y of the Pleistocene were fundamentally different than during the Holocene (11), and these differences had far-reaching implications for community structure, evolution, and extinction causes (12).A recent survey comparing the extinction dates of circumboreal megafauna with ice-age climate suggests that extinctions and genetic turnover were most frequent during warm, interstadial events (13). However, the mechanisms for these extinctions remain unclear, partly because this previous study considered multiple taxa living in many different ecosystems. Here, we focus on five megafaunal species that coinhabited a region of the Arctic with an ecological setting that is relatively well-understood. To avoid the methodological problems involved in pinpointing extinction dates (13), we infer population dynamics from changes in the relative abundance of megafauna over time. Using a uniquely large dataset of dated megafaunal bones from one particular area, we t...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Life and extinction of megafauna in the ice-age Arctic

Mann

Groves

Reanier³

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…From this they concluded environmental changes were more important than human impacts in causing extinctions. Similarly, Campos et al (2010) studied changes in the genetic diversity of muskoxen using bones from the Arctic. They found that major bottlenecks in genetic diversity, which they interpreted as reflecting bottlenecks in population size, were not correlated with the arrival dates of humans.…”

Section: Background: End-pleistocene Extinctions On the Mammoth Steppementioning

confidence: 99%

Ice-age megafauna in Arctic Alaska: extinction, invasion, survival

Mann

Groves

Kunz

et al. 2013

Quaternary Science Reviews

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Groves, Pamela; Kunz, Michael L.; Reanier, Richard E.; and Gaglioti, Benjamin V., "Ice-age megafauna in Arctic Alaska: extinction, invasion, survival" (2013 a b s t r a c tRadical restructuring of the terrestrial, large mammal fauna living in arctic Alaska occurred between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Steppe bison, horse, and woolly mammoth became extinct, moose and humans invaded, while muskox and caribou persisted. The ice age megafauna was more diverse in species and possibly contained 6Â more individual animals than live in the region today. Megafaunal biomass during the last ice age may have been 30Â greater than present. Horse was the dominant species in terms of number of individuals. Lions, short-faced bears, wolves, and possibly grizzly bears comprised the predator/scavenger guild. The youngest mammoth so far discovered lived ca 13,800 years ago, while horses and bison persisted on the North Slope until at least 12,500 years ago during the Younger Dryas cold interval. The first people arrived on the North Slope ca 13,500 years ago. Bone-isotope measurements and foot-loading characteristics suggest megafaunal niches were segregated along a moisture gradient, with the surviving species (muskox and caribou) utilizing the warmer and moister portions of the vegetation mosaic. As the ice age ended, the moisture gradient shifted and eliminated habitats utilized by the dryland, grazing species (bison, horse, mammoth). The proximate cause for this change was regional paludification, the spread of organic soil horizons and peat. End-Pleistocene extinctions in arctic Alaska represent local, not global extinctions since the megafaunal species lost there persisted to later times elsewhere. Hunting seems unlikely as the cause of these extinctions, but it cannot be ruled out as the final blow to megafaunal populations that were already functionally extinct by the time humans arrived in the region.

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“…However, most studies have been limited to single regions and limited numbers of taxa (e.g., [14][15][16][17][18], and have been beset by uncertainties in the accurate dating of human and/or megafaunal remains [e.g., the Cuddie Springs site in Australia (19)(20)(21)]. We believe that the problem is better approached by considering several landmasses simultaneously and dealing explicitly with uncertainty.…”

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confidence: 99%

Quantitative global analysis of the role of climate and people in explaining late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions

Prescott

Williams

Balmford

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

104

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The late Quaternary period saw the rapid extinction of the majority of the world's terrestrial megafauna. The cause of these dramatic losses, especially the relative importance of climatic change and the impacts of newly arrived people, remains highly controversial, with geographically restricted analyses generating conflicting conclusions. By analyzing the distribution and timing of all megafaunal extinctions in relation to climatic variables and human arrival on five landmasses, we demonstrate that the observed pattern of extinctions is best explained by models that combine both human arrival and climatic variables. Our conclusions are robust to uncertainties in climate data and in the dates of megafaunal extinctions and human arrival on different landmasses, and strongly suggest that these extinctions were driven by both anthropogenic and climatic factors.M ost of the terrestrial megafauna present 100,000 years (100 ky) ago are now extinct (1). The extinctions were geologically rapid, and almost all occurred in the past 50 ky, but their exact timing varied among different parts of the world (2). Climatic change, and overhunting, habitat alteration, or the introduction of a novel disease by recently arrived people have been put forward as competing, and sometimes interacting, explanations (3). In addition to its enormous paleontological significance, this debate has drawn wide interest for its relevance to the relationship of humans with nature and to our understanding of the current anthropogenic extinction episode (4-8).Attempts to explain megafaunal extinctions have, in addition to examining the effect of factors such as size and reproductive rate on extinction probability (9, 10), often focused on matching them in space and time with either climatic change or human arrival (11-13). However, most studies have been limited to single regions and limited numbers of taxa (e.g., 14-18), and have been beset by uncertainties in the accurate dating of human and/or megafaunal remains [e.g., the Cuddie Springs site in Australia (19-21)]. We believe that the problem is better approached by considering several landmasses simultaneously and dealing explicitly with uncertainty.We did this by analyzing the relationship, across different areas and time periods, between variation in extinction rate and variations in human arrival and climatic conditions. Specifically, we compiled a dataset of human arrival (Table 1) and megafaunal extinction dates (Table S1) from the literature. We used the Antarctic Dome C core (22) as our main source of information on climatic variability; this dataset is the most complete among available time series and is well correlated with other time series at the scale used for our analysis (Tables S2-S4). We used generalized linear models (GLMs) with a binomial error structure and a logit link function to explore the role of human arrival (classified as either just arrived or not) and climatic variables in predicting the probability of extinction for a given landmass and time period (quantified as ...

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Ancient DNA analyses exclude humans as the driving force behind late Pleistocene musk ox ( Ovibos moschatus ) population dynamics

Cited by 208 publications

References 50 publications

Life and extinction of megafauna in the ice-age Arctic

Life and extinction of megafauna in the ice-age Arctic

Ice-age megafauna in Arctic Alaska: extinction, invasion, survival

Quantitative global analysis of the role of climate and people in explaining late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions

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