Ancient Humans Linked to Unprecedented Wave of Large-Mammal Extinctions

Credit: UNL

“From a life-history standpoint, it makes some sense. If you kill a rabbit, you’re going to feed your family for a night. If you can kill a large mammal, you’re going to feed your village.”

By contrast, the research team found little support for the idea that climate change drove size-biased extinctions during the last 66 million years. Large and small mammals seemed equally vulnerable to temperature shifts throughout that span, the authors reported.

Troy Fedderson | University Communication

“If climate were causing this, we would expect to see these extinction events either sometimes (diverging from) human migration across the globe or always lining up with clear climate events in the record. And they don’t do either of those things.”

Off the face of the Earth

The team also looked ahead to examine how potential mammal extinctions could affect the world’s biodiversity. To do so, it posed a question: What would happen if the mammals currently listed as vulnerable or endangered were to go extinct within the next 200 years?

In that scenario, Lyons said, the largest remaining mammal would be the domestic cow. The average body mass would plummet to less than six pounds — roughly the size of a Yorkshire terrier.

“If this trend continues, and all the currently threatened (mammals) are lost, then energy flow and taxonomic composition will be entirely restructured,” said Smith, professor of biology at New Mexico. “In fact, mammalian body size around the globe will revert to what the world looked like 40 million years ago.”

The University of Nebraska State Museum’s Elephant Hall highlights the differences in current elephants (left) and mammoths (middle and right). Pictured (from left) is an African elephant; an Asian elephant with a juvenile; dwarf mammoth; Archie, a Columbian mammoth; and a Jefferson mammoth.

Troy Fedderson | University Communication

-Lyons said that restructuring could have “profound implications” for the world’s ecosystems. Large mammals tend to be herbivores, devouring large quantities of vegetation and effectively transporting the associated nutrients around an ecosystem. If they continue to disappear, she said, the remaining mammals would prove poor stand-ins for important ecological roles.

“The kinds of ecosystem services that are provided by large mammals are very different than what you get from small mammals,” Lyons said. “Ecosystems are going to be very, very different in the future. The last time mammal communities looked like that and had a mean body size that small was after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

“What we’re doing is potentially erasing 40 to 45 million years of mammal body-size evolution in a very short period of time.”

Smith and Lyons authored the study with Jon Payne of Stanford University and Rosemary Elliott Smith from the University of California, San Diego. The team received support from the National Science Foundation.

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