Rapid Warming and Humans Drove the Ice Age Extinction of Patagonia's Megafauna
At the end of the last ice age (11,000 to 18,000 years ago), the world suddenly lost some of the most remarkable creatures that ever roamed our planet. Patagonia in southern South America was particularly rich in creatures that could only be labelled bizarre today: elephant-sized sloths, giant jaguar, powerful sabre-toothed cats and an enormous one-tonne short-faced bear (the largest ever land-based mammalian carnivore). What caused their demise is one of the big geological whodunnits. Last year you may remember we had a research paper published in Science that looked at megafaunal extinction in North America and Eurasia . Whilst warming looked like it was a driver of the extinctions in the Northern Hemisphere, there was a tantalising hint that humans had also played a role. But disentangling the effects of both was challenging. To test their roles we have extended our work to Patagonia and the results are now published in the The American Association for the Advan...