rośliny-i-grzyby: Late Pleistocene extinctions

Evidence: 87 • authority: 72

The Late Pleistocene to the beginning of the Holocene saw the extinction of the majority of the world's megafauna, typically defined as animal species having body masses of 45 kg (99 lb) or more, which resulted in a collapse in faunal density and diversity across the globe. The extinctions during the Late Pleistocene are differentiated from previous extinctions by their extreme size bias towards large animals (with small animals being largely unaffected), the widespread absence of ecological succession to replace these extinct megafaunal species, and the regime shift of previously established faunal relationships and habitats as a consequence. The timing and severity of the extinctions vari…

Evidence: 38 • authority: 72

The Late Devonian mass extinction, also known as the Kellwasser event, was a mass extinction event which occurred around 372.15 million years ago, at the boundary between the Frasnian and Famennian ages of the Late Devonian period. It is placed as one of the "Big Five" most severe mass extinction events in Earth's history, with likely around 40% of marine species going extinct, though the degree of severity is contested. A second mass extinction called the Hangenberg event, also known as the end-Devonian extinction, occurred 13 million years later around 358.86 million years ago, bringing an end to the Famennian and Devonian, as the world transitioned into the Carboniferous Period. The effe…

Evidence: 37 • authority: 92

American mastodon extirpation in the Arctic and Subarctic predates human colonization and terminal Pleistocene climate change.. Existing radiocarbon ((14)C) dates on American mastodon (Mammut americanum) fossils from eastern Beringia (Alaska and Yukon) have been interpreted as evidence they inhabited the Arctic and Subarctic during Pleistocene full-glacial times (∼ 18,000 (14)C years B.P.). However, this chronology is inconsistent with inferred habitat preferences of mastodons and correlative paleoecological evidence. To establish a last appearance date (LAD) for M. americanum regionally, we obtained 53 new (14)C dates on 36 fossils, including specimens with previously published dates. Usin…

Evidence: 31 • authority: 72

The Pleistocene ( PLY-stə-seen, -⁠stoh-; 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. Before a change was finally confirmed in 2009 by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the cutoff of the Pleistocene and the preceding Pliocene was regarded as being 1.806 million years Before Present (BP). Publications from earlier years may use either definition of the period. The end of the Pleistocene corresponds with the end of the last glacial period and also with the end of the Paleolithic age used in archaeology. The name comes from Ancient Greek πλεῖσ…

Evidence: 31 • authority: 92

The Japanese Archipelago sheltered cave lions, not tigers, during the Late Pleistocene.. Lions and tigers, as dominant apex predators, likely became competitors when lions expanded from Africa into Eurasia approximately one million years ago (Ma), forming a lion-tiger transition belt from the Middle East through Central Asia to the Russian Far East. At the easternmost edge of this zone, the Japanese Archipelago has long been considered a Late Pleistocene tiger refugium, supported by large felid subfossils traditionally attributed to tigers ( Panthera tigris ), though their taxonomic identity remained unresolved. To clarify the origin, evolutionary history, and biogeography of Japan's Pleist…

Evidence: 25 • authority: 72

The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity in humans. It is followed by the Mesolithic. Anatomically modern humans (i.e. Homo sapiens) are believed to have emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago. It has been argued by some that their ways of life changed relatively little from that of archaic humans of the Middle Paleolithic, until about 50,000 years ago, when there was a marked increase in the diversity of artefacts found associated with m…

Evidence: 25 • authority: 72

In zoology, megafauna (from Greek μέγας megas 'large' and Neo-Latin fauna 'animal life') are large animals. The precise definition of the term varies widely, though a common threshold is approximately 45 kilograms (99 lb), this lower end being centered on humans, with other thresholds being more relative to the sizes of animals in an ecosystem. The spectrum of lower-end thresholds ranges from 10 kilograms (22 lb) to 1,000 kilograms (2,200 lb), the latter largely restricted to megaherbivores. Large body size is generally associated with other traits, such as having a slow rate of reproduction and, in large herbivores, reduced or negligible adult mortality from predation. Megafauna species ha…

Evidence: 25 • authority: 92

No evidence that hominin dispersal across Eurasia was part of a wider turnover in mammal distributions.. The drivers and consequences of hominin dispersals out of Africa remain debated. The spatial and temporal distribution of large mammal faunas contemporaneous with early Homo provides direct evidence for their ecological context and impact. In this study, we conduct taxonomic and functional similarity analyses on fossil and extant Eurasian and African large mammal communities of the last 10 Ma. We test two hypotheses: 1) the dispersal of hominins across Eurasia around or shortly after ~2 Ma was part of a wave of faunal dispersals out of Africa; 2) the arrival of hominins at Eurasian sites…