van der Kaars, S., Miller, G., Turney, C., Cook, E. J., Nürnberg, Dirk , Schönfeld, Joachim, Kershaw, A. P. and Lehman, S. (2017) Humans rather than climate the primary cause of Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in Australia. Nature Communications, 8 (14142). DOI 10.1038/ncomms14142.

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Abstract

Environmental histories that span the last full glacial cycle and are representative of regional
change in Australia are scarce, hampering assessment of environmental change preceding
and concurrent with human dispersal on the continent ca. 47,000 years ago. Here we present
a continuous 150,000-year record offshore south-western Australia and identify the timing of
two critical late Pleistocene events: wide-scale ecosystem change and regional megafaunal
population collapse. We establish that substantial changes in vegetation and fire regime
occurred B70,000 years ago under a climate much drier than today. We record high levels
of the dung fungus Sporormiella, a proxy for herbivore biomass, from 150,000 to 45,000
years ago, then a marked decline indicating megafaunal population collapse, from 45,000 to
43,100 years ago, placing the extinctions within 4,000 years of human dispersal across
Australia. These findings rule out climate change, and implicate humans, as the primary
extinction cause.

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