Collaborative Research: Megafauna Extinction, Ecosystem Disruption, and Climate Change in Australia: Assessing the Human Factor

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This award is for support of a collaborative project (between University of Colorado, Bates College, and the Carnegie Institute of Washington) to study the impact of Pleistocene colonization of Australia by modern humans. The investigators hypothesize that human burning activities destabilized ecosystems across the interior such that a large segment of the dependent fauna became extinct, and that this ecosystem change ultimately led to reduced effective moisture over the interior. The study involves a tightly focussed field campaign to acquire primary collections, and a coordinated analytical program for these samples concentrating on their physical characteristics, geochronology, and carbon isotopes as a paleovegetation proxy. By evaluating whether unparalleled shifts in the diet of Genyornis occurred as extinction approached the investigators can test whether human predation (no expected dietary change) or ecosystem collapse (expected adjustment of diet to meet these changes) is the more probable extinction mechanism.