Event: Friday Seminar: "Human-environment Synergies in Driving Late Quaternary Megafaunal Extinctions in South America"

Speaker: Dr. Emily Lindsey, University of California, Berkeley

For decades a debate has raged over the relative contributions of human activities and environmental change in driving the extinction of most of earth’s large mammals near the end of the last ice age. Recent research by our group in South America draws on archaeological, paleontological, paleoclimatological, quantitative modeling, and geochemical studies in order to investigate how these extinctions progressed through space and time across the continent. These studies reveal complex synergistic interactions between climatic and anthropogenic pressures, and highlight the need for integrating multiple regional-scale analyses in order to understand how large-scale extinction events transpired in the past, and how they are likely to proceed in the context of ongoing climate change and growing human impacts today.