XPost: sci.archaeology

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-human-contributed-woolly-rhinoceros-extinction.html

Researchers have discovered sustained hunting
by humans prevented the woolly rhinoceros from
accessing favorable habitats as Earth warmed
following the Last Ice Age.

An international team of researchers, led by
scientists from the University of Adelaide and
University of Copenhagen, used computer modeling
to make the discovery, shedding light on an
eons-old mystery.

"Using computer models, fossils and ancient DNA,
we traced 52,000 years of population history of
the woolly rhinoceros across Eurasia at a
resolution not previously considered possible,"
said lead author Associate Professor Damien
Fordham, from the University of Adelaide's
Environment Institute.

"This showed that from 30,000 years ago, a
combination of cooling temperatures and low but
sustained hunting by humans caused the woolly
rhinoceros to contract its distribution
southward, trapping it in a scattering of
isolated and rapidly deteriorating habitats at
the end of the Last Ice Age.

"As Earth thawed and temperatures rose,
populations of woolly rhinoceros were unable to
colonize important new habitats opening up in
the north of Eurasia, causing them to
destabilize and crash, bringing about their
extinction."
...



https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316419121
52,000 years of woolly rhinoceros population
dynamics reveal extinction mechanisms

Significance
Using a computationally intensive modeling
approach and extensive paleontological and
ancient DNA information, we reveal how and
why the woolly rhinoceros went extinct at a
fine spatiotemporal resolution. Our
population reconstructions indicate that a
combination of climate-driven habitat
fragmentation and low but persistent levels
of hunting by humans weakened metapopulation
processes and caused their extinction. Our
results provide a deeper understanding of
the structure and dynamics of past
extinctions of megafauna, simultaneously
providing valuable lessons to safeguard
Earth’s remaining large animals.

Abstract
The extinction of the woolly rhinoceros
(Coelodonta antiquitatis) at the onset of the
Holocene remains an enigma, with conflicting
evidence regarding its cause and
spatiotemporal dynamics. This partly reflects
challenges in determining demographic
responses of late Quaternary megafauna to
climatic and anthropogenic causal drivers
with available genetic and paleontological
techniques. Here, we show that elucidating
mechanisms of ancient extinctions can benefit
from a detailed understanding of fine-scale
metapopulation dynamics, operating over many
millennia. Using an abundant fossil record,
ancient DNA, and high-resolution simulation
models, we untangle the ecological mechanisms
and causal drivers that are likely to have
been integral in the decline and later
extinction of the woolly rhinoceros. Our
52,000-y reconstruction of distribution-wide
metapopulation dynamics supports a pathway to
extinction that began long before the Holocene,
when the combination of cooling temperatures
and low but sustained hunting by humans trapped
woolly rhinoceroses in suboptimal habitats
along the southern edge of their range.
Modeling indicates that this ecological trap
intensified after the end of the last ice age,
preventing colonization of newly formed
suitable habitats, weakening stabilizing
metapopulation processes, triggering the
extinction of the woolly rhinoceros in the
early Holocene. Our findings suggest that
fragmentation and resultant metapopulation
dynamics should be explicitly considered in
explanations of late Quaternary megafauna
extinctions, sending a clarion call to the
fragility of the remaining large-bodied grazers
restricted to disjunct fragments of poor-quality
habitat due to anthropogenic environmental
change.

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