Media release

From: The Royal Society

Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts

Biology Letters

Fossil bones reveal how people have reshaped the animal world. We examined species lists from hundreds of archaeological and palaeontological sites spanning the past 50 000 years. In the Ice Age, mammal communities followed continent-wide patterns set by climate and geography. After farming began, just a handful of livestock species spread with humans and scrambled those natural boundaries. Our new computer-clustering method shows that domestic animal remains link sites thousands of kilometres apart, while many wild mammals disappear. The study shows how agriculture and hunting combined as powerful global forces in reorganising ecosystems and still guides conservation challenges today.