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

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Approximately 13,000 years ago, 37 genera of North American megafauna went extinct. Proboscideans, mammoths, and mastodons, specifically, were among the megafauna affected. Today, researchers continue to debate between three hypotheses to explain these North American Pleistocene mass extinctions: (1) human over-hunting, (2) climate change leading to a reduced niche, or (3) a combination of both. Our previous research suggests that the effects of the warming, drying, and more seasonal climate at the end of the Pleistocene likely caused a competitive environment between mammoth and mastodon seen in a drastic shift in both species' niche space. While ecological theory predicts that competition can drive species to extinction, our original sample was not complete. We expand our previous work by increasing our database, including new site location data and radiocarbon dates, and completing reconstructions of key paleoenvironmental variables. Our objective is to model the effects of climate change and human hunting on the niche space of North American proboscideans within Bayesian hierarchical and Structural Equation causal inference frameworks. This study will enhance our understanding of the changing environments in which this megafauna lived and may have implications for studying modern extinction events.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Bayesian Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33316