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The Late Pleistocene saw the extinction of many mammals weighing more than 40 kilograms (88 lb), including around 80% of mammals over 1 tonne. The proportion of megafauna extinctions is progressively larger the further the human migratory distance from Africa, with the highest extinction rates in Australia, and North and South America.
Paul Martin at Rampart Cave, home of the Shasta ground sloth in Grand Canyon, ca. 1975. Paul Schultz Martin (born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1928, died in Tucson, Arizona September 13, 2010) [1] [2] was an American geoscientist at the University of Arizona who developed the theory that the Pleistocene extinction of large mammals worldwide was caused by overhunting by humans. [3]
The Late Pleistocene is an unofficial age in the international geologic timescale in chronostratigraphy, also known as the Upper Pleistocene from a stratigraphic perspective. It is intended to be the fourth division of the Pleistocene Epoch within the ongoing Quaternary Period. It is currently defined as the time between c. 129,000 and c ...
While widespread, the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis is commonly criticized and a controversial idea among researchers. In the case of the Vanuatu turtles, it may have been invasive species such as pigs and rats that were a bigger threat to the species than humans, as they would raid nests and prey on juvenile turtles.
The Quaternary Period is a geologic time period that can be separated into two epochs, the Pleistocene ("most recent") Epoch, generally defined as beginning about 2.58 million years ago, and the Holocene ("wholly modern") Epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago. [5] [6] The study of Quaternary science began in the late eighteenth century in ...
The Pleistocene (/ ˈ p l aɪ s t ə ˌ s iː n,-s t oʊ-/ PLY-stə-seen, -stoh-; [4] [5] referred to colloquially as the Ice Age) is the geological epoch that lasted from c. 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations.
The Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) is an extinct species of mammoth that inhabited North America from southern Canada to Costa Rica during the Pleistocene epoch. The Columbian mammoth descended from Eurasian steppe mammoths that colonised North America during the Early Pleistocene around 1.5–1.3 million years ago, and later experienced hybridisation with the woolly mammoth lineage.
The last notoungulates, the toxodontids Toxodon, Mixotoxodon and Piauhytherium became extinct at the end of the Late Pleistocene around 12,000 years ago as part of the Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, along with most other large mammals in the Americas. The extinction coincides with the arrival of the first humans to the Americas and ...