Past Extinctions of Homo Species Coincided with Increased Vulnerability to Climatic Change

Raia, Pasquale; Mondanaro, Alessandro; Melchionna, Marina; Febbraro, Mirko Di; Diniz‐Filho, José Alexandre Felizola; Rangel, Thiago F.; Holden, Philip B.; Carotenuto, Francesco; Edwards, Neil R.; Lima‐Ribeiro, Matheus S.; Profico, Antonio; Maiorano, Luigi; Castiglione, Silvia; Serio, Carmela; Rook, Lorenzo

doi:10.1016/j.oneear.2020.09.007

Cited by 44 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…S1). These controls are subject to orbital and millennial-to-centennial scale fluctuations, which have led to significant past fluctuations in regional precipitation and to habitat change, forcing the biota to adapt, migrate, or face local extinction [10][11][12][13][14] .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hydroclimate changes in eastern Africa over the past 200,000 years may have influenced early human dispersal

Schaebitz

Asrat

Lamb

et al. 2021

Commun Earth Environ

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Reconstructions of climatic and environmental conditions can contribute to current debates about the factors that influenced early human dispersal within and beyond Africa. Here we analyse a 200,000-year multi-proxy paleoclimate record from Chew Bahir, a tectonic lake basin in the southern Ethiopian rift. Our record reveals two modes of climate change, both associated temporally and regionally with a specific type of human behavior. The first is a long-term trend towards greater aridity between 200,000 and 60,000 years ago, modulated by precession-driven wet-dry cycles. Here, more favorable wetter environmental conditions may have facilitated long-range human expansion into new territory, while less favorable dry periods may have led to spatial constriction and isolation of local human populations. The second mode of climate change observed since 60,000 years ago mimics millennial to centennial-scale Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and Heinrich events. We hypothesize that human populations may have responded to these shorter climate fluctuations with local dispersal between montane and lowland habitats.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hydroclimate changes in eastern Africa over the past 200,000 years may have influenced early human dispersal

Schaebitz

Asrat

Lamb

et al. 2021

Commun Earth Environ

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“…Age estimates for fossil layers come with some uncertainty. To account for this, following Raia et al (2020), we generated a set of 100 SDM replications for each species. At each replication, for each fossil site, the age was drawn from a uniform distribution ranging from the minimum to the maximum age estimate of the site.…”

Section: Species Distribution Models (Sdms)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of habitat fragmentation in Pleistocene megafauna extinction in Eurasia

et al. 2021

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The idea that several small, rather than a single large, habitat areas should hold the highest total species richness (the so-called SLOSS debate) brings into question the importance of habitat fragmentation to extinction risk. SLOSS studies are generally addressed over a short time scale, potentially ignoring the long-term dimension of extinction risk. Here, we provide the first long-term evaluation of the role of habitat fragmentation in species extinction, focusing on 22 large mammal species that lived in Eurasia during the last 200 000 years. By combining species distribution models and landscape pattern analysis, we compared temporal dynamics of habitat spatial structure between extinct and extant species, estimating the size, number and degree of the geographical isolation of their suitable habitat patches. Our results evidenced that extinct mammals went through considerable habitat fragmentation during the last glacial period and started to fare worse than extant species from about 50 ka. In particular, our modelling effort constrains the fragmentation of habitats into a narrow time window, from 46 to 36 ka ago, surprisingly coinciding with known extinction dates of several megafauna species. Landscape spatial structure was the second most important driver affecting megafauna extinction risk (ca 38% importance), after body mass (ca 39%) and followed by dietary preferences (ca 20%). Our results indicate a major role played by landscape fragmentation on extinction. Such evidence provides insights on what might likely happen in the future, with climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation acting as the main forces exerting their negative effects on biodiversity.

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“…Indeed, perhaps one of the most relevant contributions EBAs can make to larger conversations about climate change is our understanding of the adaptation in "climate-change adaptation." Climate change has been a major selection pressure affecting human evolution over the last 5-7 million years (Pisor & Jones, 2021a)-likely contributing to the extinctions of other species of Homo (Raia et al, 2020)-and anthropologists have been studying adaptation for the last century (Jones et al, 2021). Our focus on the time depth of human adaptation through paleoanthropology and archaeology gives us insight into how humans have responded, and can respond in the future, to large environmental perturbations (Behrensmeyer, 2006;Kohler & Rockman, 2020;Xu et al, 2020).…”

Section: Contribution #1: a Place-based Understanding Of Climate-change Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How can evolutionary and biological anthropologists engage broader audiences?

Jones

Pisor

Douglass

et al. 2021

American J Hum Biol

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Objectives: With our diverse training, theoretical and empirical toolkits, and rich data, evolutionary and biological anthropologists (EBAs) have much to contribute to research and policy decisions about climate change and other pressing social issues. However, we remain largely absent from these critical, ongoing efforts. Here, we draw on the literature and our own experiences to make recommendations for how EBAs can engage broader audiences, including the communities with whom we collaborate, a more diverse population of students, researchers in other disciplines and the development sector, policymakers, and the general public. These recommendations include:(1) playing to our strength in longitudinal, place-based research, (2) collaborating more broadly, (3) engaging in greater public communication of science, (4) aligning our work with open-science practices to the extent possible, and(5) increasing diversity of our field and teams through intentional action, outreach, training, and mentorship. Conclusions:We EBAs need to put ourselves out there: research and engagement are complementary, not opposed to each other. With the resources and workable examples we provide here, we hope to spur more EBAs to action. | INTRODUCTIONAnthropologists have the capacity to contribute to debates about matters of pressing social importance, from climate change to crises of morbidity and mortality, poverty, migration, parochialism and tolerance, and beyond.

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Past Extinctions of Homo Species Coincided with Increased Vulnerability to Climatic Change

Abstract: Past extinctions of Homo species coincided with increased vulnerability to climatic change. One Earth, 3(4) pp. 480-490.For guidance on citations see FAQs.

Cited by 44 publications

References 70 publications

Hydroclimate changes in eastern Africa over the past 200,000 years may have influenced early human dispersal

Hydroclimate changes in eastern Africa over the past 200,000 years may have influenced early human dispersal

The role of habitat fragmentation in Pleistocene megafauna extinction in Eurasia

How can evolutionary and biological anthropologists engage broader audiences?

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