Hi Mark,

There's a recent paper that reviews the strengths and weaknesses of various modeling approaches to this question:

Yule, J. V., R. J. Fournier, C. X. J. Jensen, and J. Yang. 2014. A Review and Synthesis of Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling: Progress Delayed by Mismatches between Ecological Realism, Interpretation, and Methodological Transparency. The Quarterly Review of Biology 89:91–106.

The paper that I'm most familiar with that comes out with a strong statement that early humans caused these extinctions is:

Lyons, S. K., F. A. Smith, and J. H. Brown. 2004. Of mice, mastodons and men: human-mediated extinctions on four continents. Evolutionary Ecology 6:339–358.

And another older review:

Barnosky, A. D., P. L. Koch, R. S. Feranec, S. L. Wing, and A. B. Shabel. 2004. Assessing the causes of late Pleistocene extinctions on the continents. Science 306:70–75.

Perhaps these will give you a start!

Cheers,

Elizabeth

This is one of the most depressing papers I have ever read. We are just at the tipping point beyond which it might be impossible to eradicate the invasive species causing a one-per-decade extinction rate in Australia: Woinarski JC, Burbidge AA, Harrison PL. 2015. Ongoing unraveling of a continental fauna: Decline and extinction of Australian mammals since European settlement. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A.

Hello Dr. Bertness,

Below is an example of a near extinction of  a songbird species (one of several) in the Seychelles islands.

Also a more recent review of avian taxonomic groups that have gone extinct:

Jan Komdeur, Ian D. Bullock and Michael R. W. Rands (1991). Conserving the Seychelles Warbler Acrocephalus sechellensis by translocation: a transfer from Cousin Island to Aride Island. Bird Conservation International, 1, pp 177-185. doi:10.1017/S0959270900002045.

Szabo JK, Khwaja N, Garnett ST, Butchart SHM (2012) Global Patterns and Drivers of Avian Extinctions at the Species and Subspecies Level. PLoS ONE 7(10): e47080. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047080

Hope its of use,

Regards,

Arno

Mark

In Australia, the topic is overwhelmed by a bizarre political determination to show that people were bad.  To do this some people have recruited evidence of extinct animals that were long gone by the time humans arrived.  There seems to be a determination not to understand that extinction must be a normal process otherwise evolution would not happen.  Nevertheless, there is some impact of early humans in Australia.  We just don't know what it was.  And of course there has been a huge impact of recent humans.  I was involved in two papers that attempted to introduce a little less hysteria into the story.

Wroe, S., Field, J. H., Archer, M., Grayson, D. K., Price, G. J., Louys, J., . . . Mooney, S. D. (2013). Climate change frames debate over the extinction of megafauna in Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(22), 8777-8781. doi:10.1073/pnas.1302698110

Wroe, S., Field, J. H., Archer, M., Grayson, D. K., Price, G. J., Louys, J., . . . Mooney, S. D. (2013). Reply to Brook et al: No empirical evidence for human overkill of megafauna in Sahul. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(36), E3369. doi:10.1073/pnas.1310440110