Post ice-age extinctions of large mammals linked to humans, not climate change
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 07:20
in Biology & Nature
(Phys.org) —A team of researchers with Aarhus University in Denmark has concluded that the die-out of large mammals after the last ice-age was due more too human activity than a changing environment. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the team describes how they conducted a country by country survey of all known species extinctions from one thousand years ago to 132,000 years ago. In comparing what they found with known environmental changes during the same period they found a pattern emerging that fingered humans as the main cause of the majority of the extinctions.