Differential effects of temperature change and human impact on European Late Quaternary mammalian extinctions

Abstract

Species that inhabited Europe during the Late Quaternary were impacted by temperature changes and early humans, resulting in the disappearance of half of the European large mammals. However, quantifying the relative importance that each factor had in the extinction risk of species has been challenging, mostly due to the spatio-temporal biases of fossil records, which complicate the calibration of realistic and accurate ecological niche modeling. Here, we overcome this problem by using ecotypes, and not real species, to run our models. We created 40 ecotypes with different temperature requirements (mean temperature from -20 °C to 25 °C and temperature range from 10 °C to 40 °C) and used them to quantify the effect of climate change and human impact. Our results show that cold-adapted ecotypes would have been highly affected by past temperature changes in Europe, whereas temperate and warm-adapted ecotypes would have been positively affected by temperature change. Human impact affected all ecotypes negatively, and temperate ecotypes suffered the greatest impacts. Based on these results, the extinction of cold-adapted species like Mammuthus primigenius may be related to temperature change, while the extinction of temperate species, like Crocuta crocuta, may be related to human impact. Our results suggest that temperature change and human impact affected different ecotypes in distinct ways, and that the interaction of both impacts may have shaped species extinctions in Europe.

Keywords: Pleistocene; climate change; ecotypes; extinction; megafauna; range shift.