Dawn of the Anthropocene: How humans in a warming climate drove Pleistocene mammal extinctions and re-shaped California’s landscapes

The relative roles late-Quaternary climate changes and human actions played in the extinction of most of the world’s large mammals at the end of the Ice Age have been long-debated.  One key challenge is that the fossil record in most regions is too poorly-constrained to precisely pinpoint the disappearance times of different species and align these with environmental and anthropogenic phenomena.  In this talk, I will describe how a large-scale, interdisciplinary effort brought together several remarkable records from southern California to unveil a regional story of fire, extinction, and ecosystem state shift. This discovery has significant implications for global megafaunal extinctions research as well as modern conservation efforts.