The Effect of Climate Change on the Niche Space of North American Proboscideans

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Most researchers agree that the extinction events of North American megafauna, including proboscideans, occurred approximately 13,000 years ago. The reason for the demise of these creatures, in particular proboscideans such as mammoth and mastodon, is a matter of debate. There are three accepted general hypotheses explaining the extinction of these North American megafauna: (1) human over-hunting (2) climate change leading to a reduced niche, or (3) a combination of climate change and human over-hunting. While two of the three hypotheses invoke climate and environmental change as a factor impacting proboscidean extinctions, how climate change might have affected the suitability of the proboscideans’ environments remains unclear. Here, using archaeological and paleontological location data and paleoenvironmental reconstructions of key environmental variables, we reconstruct and examine the niche space occupied by North American proboscideans and investigate the effects of climate-variable changes on niche space fluctuations between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. Studying the impact of climate change on the proboscidean niche should facilitate parsing the non-human effects on their disappearance, and increase focus on the effects that human hunting might have had on these mammal extinctions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25596