Wednesday, July 16, 2014

People, Not Climate Change, Caused the Last Great Extinction

The map, from this study, shows the percentage of large mammal species that went extinct at during the last Ice Age. The number is not at all correlated with changes in temperature or other climate variables but very strongly correlated with the arrival of modern  humans. Most of the dark red spots on the map are in Australia and the Americas, the two areas where modern  humans arrived most recently. There has been little extinction in Africa because those animals evolved together with hominids over the past four million years.

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