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Humans and global warming responsible for extinction of mammoths mongabay.com March 31, 2008 Study confirms that habitat fragmentation, caused by climate change, split species into small populations, making them more vulnerable to extinction.
Scientists have long debated whether climate change or human hunting were the more important driver in the demise of North America's megafauna towards the end of the last Ice Age. Now new modeling by David Nogues-Bravo, a biologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues supports the theory that synergistic effects of warming climate and new human predators drove mammoths to extinction.
"These results support the view that the synergy between the collapse of suitable climatic conditions for the woolly mammoths and northward increase in human population densities during the Holocene set the place and time of the woolly mammoth's extinction," write the authors. "Our results suggest that climate change and human impacts progressively cornered the mammoth in the northernmost land masses of Arctic Siberia and some arctic islands, leaving them with nowhere to run away from extinction." Citation: Nogués-Bravo D, Rodríguez J, Hortal J, Batra P, Araújo MB (2008) Climate change, humans, and the extinction of the woolly mammoth. PLoS Biol 6(4): e79. doi:10. 1371/journal.pbio.0060079 Related Man may be responsible for prehistoric extinctions May 5, 2006 New research suggests that prehistoric horses in Alaska may have been hunted into extinction by man, rather than doomed by climate change as previously thought. The study is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Supernova could be responsible for extinction of the mammoth September 24, 2005 A distant supernova that exploded 41,000 years ago may have led to the extinction of the mammoth, according to research that will be presented tomorrow (Sept. 24) by nuclear scientist Richard Firestone of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
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