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Nature Research, Nature Communications, 1(7), 2016

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10511

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

Journal article published in 2016 by Frédérik Saltréa, Frédérik Saltré, Marta Rodríguez-Rey, Barry W. Brook, Christopher N. Johnson, Chris S. M. Turney ORCID, John Alroy, Alan Cooper ORCID, Nicholas Beeton ORCID, Michael I. Bird ORCID, Damien A. Fordham, Richard Gillespie ORCID, Salvador Herrando-Pérez, Zenobia Jacobs, Gifford H. Miller and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Frédérik Saltré [et al.],. Received 25 June 2015 Accepted 13 December 2015 Published 29 January 2016 ; 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 ensemblehindcasting 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 B13,500 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. ; Peer reviewed