Using the Present to Uncover the Past: Reconstructing the Ecology and Behaviour of Extinct Large Mammals on the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (South Coast, South Africa)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Understanding the ecological role of extinct large mammals is an ongoing challenging research problem. The use of species traits (physical and behavioral) to characterize functional communities is becoming common in ecological modelling and is key to understanding the ecological role that species would have filled under historic conditions. This same approach may help elucidate the ecological role of extinct species. Here we illustrate this approach with extinct species of the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (PAP) during the last glacial maximum. Using functional groups representing an array of characteristics displayed by similar species (e.g. social behaviors, stress response, forage choice, and interpretation of the landscape) we can understand the ecological niche that the extinct species of the PAP would have filled. To relate current behavior of large mammals to those that are now extinct we determined functional groups of extant species (southern and east Africa) using Principle Component Analysis combined with a hierarchical tree analysis. We then linked the extinct species of the PAP, through known taxonomic and feeding guild traits to the extant functional groups. This provides us with an understanding of the ecological and behavioral characteristics of extinct large mammals and the integral part these species played in the PAP landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24567