It was bound to happen. After years of successful avoidance I have finally succumbed to the dark side: palaeo-ecology.
I suppose the delve from historical/modern ecology into prehistory was inevitable given (a) my long-term association with brain-the-size-of-a-planet Barry Brook (who, incidentally, has reinvented his research career many times) and (b) there is no logic to contend that palaeo extinction patterns differ in any meaningful way from modern biodiversity extinctions (except, of course, that the latter are caused mainly by human endeavour).
So while the last, fleeting days of my holiday break accelerate worringly toward office-incarceration next week, I take this moment to present a brand-new paper of ours that has just come out online in (wait for it) Quaternary Science Reviews entitled Robust estimates of extinction time in the geological record.
Let me explain my reasons for this strange departure.
It all started after a few drinks (doesn’t it always) discussing the uncertainties associated with the timing of megafauna extinctions – you might be aware that traditionally there have been two schools of thought on late-Pleistocene extinction pulses: (1) those who think there were mainly caused by massive climate shifts not to dissimilar to what we are experiencing now and (2) those who believe that the arrival of humans into naïve regions lead to a ‘blitzkrieg‘ of hunting and overkill. Rarely do adherents of each stance agree (and sometimes, the ‘debate’ can get ugly given the political incorrectness of inferring that prehistoric peoples were as destructive as we are today – cf. the concept of the ‘noble savage‘). Read the rest of this entry »
ConservationBytes.com 