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| Late Quaternary megafauna extinctions impoverished mammalian diversity worldwide. The
causes of these extinctions in Australia are most controversial but essential to resolve,
because this continent-wide event presaged similar losses that occurred thousands of years
later on other continents. Here we apply a rigorous metadata analysis and new ensemblehindcasting
approach to 659 Australian megafauna fossil ages. When coupled with analysis
of several high-resolution climate records, we show that megafaunal extinctions were broadly
synchronous among genera and independent of climate aridity and variability in Australia
over the last 120,000 years. Our results reject climate change as the primary driver of
megafauna extinctions in the world’s most controversial context, and instead estimate that
the megafauna disappeared Australia-wide B13,500 years after human arrival, with shorter
periods of coexistence in some regions. This is the first comprehensive approach to
incorporate uncertainty in fossil ages, extinction timing and climatology, to quantify
mechanisms of prehistorical extinctions. | |
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