Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
There’s new evidence that humans drove to extinction the unique megafauna on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Dwarf hippopotamuses and elephants once roamed the island, but they disappeared soon after palaeolithic humans arrived on the scene about 14,000 years ago.
A new modelling study estimates that the likely population of hunter-gatherers in Late Pleistocene Cyprus – 3,000 to 7,000 people – could have easily driven these species to extinction in less than a millennia.
“Our results provide strong evidence that palaeolithic peoples in Cyprus were at least partially responsible for megafauna extinctions during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene,” says lead author, Professor Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University in South Australia.
“The main determinant of extinction risk for both species was the proportion of edible meat they provided to the first people on the island.”
They found humans would have first driven to extinction the dwarf hippopotamus (Phanourios minor), weighing in at just 130kg, followed by the 500kg dwarf elephant (Palaeoloxodon cypriotes).
The researchers used reconstructions of human energetic needs (nutrient intake required to maintain survival and reproduction), diet composition, prey choice, and hunting efficiency to model megafauna population dynamics for different population sizes of humans.
“Cyprus is the perfect location to test our models because the island offers an ideal set of conditions to examine whether the arrival of populations of humans ultimately led to the extinction of its megafauna species,” says Dr Theodora Moutsiou of the University of Cyprus and Australia’s James Cook University.
These conditions include the island’s small area (about 11,000 square km or 4,200 sq.miles), low diversity of megafauna (just 2 species), and late settlement by humans (13.2 to 14.2 thousand years ago).
The resulting model predictions matched the chronological sequence of megafauna extinctions found in the palaeontological record, refuting previous arguments that humans played no part in their extinction on Cyprus.
“Our research lays the foundation for an improved understanding on the impact small human populations can have in terms of disrupting native ecosystems and causing major extinctions even during a period of low technological capacity,” says Moutsiou.
The research is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
