07 August 2012
Early human arrival
A Letter in PNAS entitled “Human arrival scenarios have a strong influence on interpretations of the late Quaternary extinctions” by David Nogués-Bravo and Katherine Ann Marske provides a comment on the analyses recently published by Prescott et al. (2012) in PNAS on the relative roles of human arrival and climate change on the late Quaternary extinctions.
Disentangling the effects of humans and climate on megafaunal extinctions is essential because their relative importance across time and space remains one of the key missing pieces to solving the Late Quaternary extinctions puzzle.