期刊
SCIENCE
卷 362, 期 6417, 页码 938-+出版社
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.aau2728
关键词
-
资金
- Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship [DE160100030]
It has long been proposed that pre-modern hominin impacts drove extinctions and shaped the evolutionary history of Africa's exceptionally diverse large mammal communities, but this hypothesis has yet to be rigorously tested. We analyzed eastern African herbivore communities spanning the past 7 million years-encompassing the entirety of hominin evolutionary history-to test the hypothesis that top-down impacts of tool-bearing, meat-eating hominins contributed to the demise of megaherbivores prior to the emergence of Homo sapiens. We document a steady, long-term decline ofmegaherbivores beginning similar to 4.6 million years ago, long before the appearance of hominin species capable of exerting top-down control of large mammal communities and predating evidence for hominin interactions with megaherbivore prey. Expansion of C-4 grasslands can account for the loss of megaherbivore diversity.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据