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Path: ...!feed.opticnetworks.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Primum Sapienti <invalide@invalid.invalid> Newsgroups: sci.anthropology.paleo,sci.archaeology Subject: Human activity contributed to woolly rhinoceros' extinction Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2024 16:50:49 -0600 Organization: sum Lines: 105 Message-ID: <v45bkb$3ru6g$1@dont-email.me> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:50:52 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="7cbe64c03b7cc903ec20d138d1d7c996"; logging-data="4061392"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX188GQlmN6P/YAQci3/ijcwx" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0 SeaMonkey/2.53.14 Cancel-Lock: sha1:30j+WiJdNIcnLpaMm/m8Do/vtq8= X-Mozilla-News-Host: snews://news.eternal-september.org:563 Bytes: 4959 https://phys.org/news/2024-06-human-contributed-woolly-rhinoceros-extinction.html Researchers have discovered sustained hunting by humans prevented the woolly rhinoceros from accessing favorable habitats as Earth warmed following the Last Ice Age. An international team of researchers, led by scientists from the University of Adelaide and University of Copenhagen, used computer modeling to make the discovery, shedding light on an eons-old mystery. "Using computer models, fossils and ancient DNA, we traced 52,000 years of population history of the woolly rhinoceros across Eurasia at a resolution not previously considered possible," said lead author Associate Professor Damien Fordham, from the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute. "This showed that from 30,000 years ago, a combination of cooling temperatures and low but sustained hunting by humans caused the woolly rhinoceros to contract its distribution southward, trapping it in a scattering of isolated and rapidly deteriorating habitats at the end of the Last Ice Age. "As Earth thawed and temperatures rose, populations of woolly rhinoceros were unable to colonize important new habitats opening up in the north of Eurasia, causing them to destabilize and crash, bringing about their extinction." .... https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316419121 52,000 years of woolly rhinoceros population dynamics reveal extinction mechanisms Significance Using a computationally intensive modeling approach and extensive paleontological and ancient DNA information, we reveal how and why the woolly rhinoceros went extinct at a fine spatiotemporal resolution. Our population reconstructions indicate that a combination of climate-driven habitat fragmentation and low but persistent levels of hunting by humans weakened metapopulation processes and caused their extinction. Our results provide a deeper understanding of the structure and dynamics of past extinctions of megafauna, simultaneously providing valuable lessons to safeguard Earth’s remaining large animals. Abstract The extinction of the woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) at the onset of the Holocene remains an enigma, with conflicting evidence regarding its cause and spatiotemporal dynamics. This partly reflects challenges in determining demographic responses of late Quaternary megafauna to climatic and anthropogenic causal drivers with available genetic and paleontological techniques. Here, we show that elucidating mechanisms of ancient extinctions can benefit from a detailed understanding of fine-scale metapopulation dynamics, operating over many millennia. Using an abundant fossil record, ancient DNA, and high-resolution simulation models, we untangle the ecological mechanisms and causal drivers that are likely to have been integral in the decline and later extinction of the woolly rhinoceros. Our 52,000-y reconstruction of distribution-wide metapopulation dynamics supports a pathway to extinction that began long before the Holocene, when the combination of cooling temperatures and low but sustained hunting by humans trapped woolly rhinoceroses in suboptimal habitats along the southern edge of their range. Modeling indicates that this ecological trap intensified after the end of the last ice age, preventing colonization of newly formed suitable habitats, weakening stabilizing metapopulation processes, triggering the extinction of the woolly rhinoceros in the early Holocene. Our findings suggest that fragmentation and resultant metapopulation dynamics should be explicitly considered in explanations of late Quaternary megafauna extinctions, sending a clarion call to the fragility of the remaining large-bodied grazers restricted to disjunct fragments of poor-quality habitat due to anthropogenic environmental change.