This event is part of our ongoing Tuesday Lunch Seminar Series.

The megafaunal extinctions of the Late Pleistocene are well known to have wiped out the largest mammal species all around the world. Therefore, they can serve as a recent analogue for modern biodiversity loss. In this talk, I will present on my dissertation research which looked at the impacts of these extinctions on the biomass and energy use of 652 fossil assemblages from across the globe.
Both metrics were greatly reduced after the extinctions and the biogeographical distribution of energy-use patterns was fundamentally altered in ways that relate to the development of agriculture and animal domestications in the Holocene. Fascinating relationships between assemblage energy use and species richness are also explored. Overall, this talk will give new insights into how humans have impacted mammal communities over the past 130,000 years.