Some real good data with a great presentation.
I have always thought man was the culprit not climate.
Of course this is just Elephants but it should not need
a large imagination to apply the data to other Mega Fauna.
Here is the link and abstract.
Zuma
www.pnas.org/content/102/17/6231.longGlobal archaeological evidence for proboscidean overkill
Todd Surovell*†, Nicole Waguespack*, and P. Jeffrey Brantingham‡
Author Affiliations
Communicated by George C. Frison, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, March 9, 2005 (received for review December 14, 2004)
Abstract Full Text Authors & Info Figures SI Metrics Related Content PDFNext SectionAbstract
One million years ago, proboscideans occupied most of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Today, wild elephants are only found in portions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Although the causes of global Pleistocene extinctions in the order Proboscidea remain unresolved, the most common explanations involve climatic change and/or human hunting. In this report, we test the overkill and climate-change hypotheses by using global archaeological spatiotemporal patterning in proboscidean kill/scavenge sites. Spanning ≈1.8 million years, the archaeological record of human subsistence exploitation of proboscideans is preferentially located on the edges of the human geographic range. This finding is commensurate with global overkill, suggesting that prehistoric human range expansion resulted in localized extinction events. In the present and the past, proboscideans have survived in refugia that are largely inaccessible to human populations.
